1. United States
2. Ark.
3. Letter

These repeated predictable events in medicine will happen again. Arkansas politicians say in these scenarios the women and doctors are criminals of the follow the World Heath Organization standard OB practice. An alternative point of view is the lawmakers are criminals. Forcing these situations and causing death. I understood since I was a child my beliefs are mine and I shouldn’t try to force them on others. How is that hard to understand for Republican politicians? Go back to church and leave the state to those who actually care about the people. What happened to Waldorf is not unique. Grow a conscience or resign. “Almost exactly three years before Waldorf showed up at Washington Regional in urgent need of care, a 28-year-old woman named Josseli Barnica arrived at a Houston emergency room with the same condition. She, too, was 17 weeks pregnant. The fetus’ head was pressed up against her dilated cervix, and a miscarriage was, according to her medical record, “inevitable.”  When her husband rushed from work to her side, she relayed what she said the medical team had told her: Inducing delivery or emptying her uterus would be “a crime,” he later told ProPublica. “They had to wait until there was no heartbeat.” Texas, like Arkansas, has a criminal abortion ban. Had Barnica landed in one of the hospitals across the world, from Nigeria to Mexico, that follow standards from the World Health Organization and countless medical associations, her treatment would have been much different. In those hospitals, when a patient’s cervix opens too soon, signaling an “inevitable miscarriage,” or when their water breaks before the fetus can survive, known as previable preterm premature rupture of membranes (shorthanded as “PPROM”), it’s standard for doctors to offer to empty the uterus. That’s true even if there is still a heartbeat, given the high risk of infection.  “This is basic obstetrics,” said Dr. Alison Goulding, a maternal-fetal-medicine specialist in Texas. “Everyone should know that you have to provide an abortion in these settings or women can die.” “