YOU DID THIS

Greetings. I am a voting constituent in rural west Texas. Required reading for all of my Texas reps who are standing by with solicitous concern for women’s health. A crisis of women’s health rather, created by anyone who has aided and abetted and voted for taking our rights away. And allowing us to sicken and die with cavalier comments such as ‘Sue the doctor.’ Stephanie Taladrid, New Yorker, May 6, 2023 IN THE POST-ROE ERA, LETTING PREGNANT PATIENTS GET SICKER—BY DESIGN Fearing legal repercussions, doctors in Texas say they are risking grave patient harm to comply with new abortion restrictions. A few excerpts: “The Texas doctors I spoke to, like their counterparts in other hospitals across conservative states, described ob-gyn units where, today, workers must shoulder responsibilities that have little to do with saving the lives of mothers, let alone doing no harm. Instead, as pregnant women get sicker—by design—doctors have been weighing the risk of offering treatment that they feel is right for a patient against the risk of legal repercussions that might cost them their livelihoods or even land them in prison. They’ve been soliciting the opinions of hospital lawyers and ethicists. They’ve been considering institutional liability and struggling to reinterpret concepts such as due diligence. In short, in a context of fear and bureaucratic anxiety, they’ve been scrambling—trying to reconcile abortion-law language with the daily urgencies of women they’re encountering on gurneys in emergency-room cubicles. Just how endangered does a sick patient have to be before her doctor can intervene? And how much time can a doctor and her colleagues take in deciding before it’s too late for a patient?” “The Texas laws are “a patchwork,” said Jamila Perritt, an ob-gyn and the C.E.O. of Physicians for Reproductive Health, “and deliberately confusing.” And that confusion sometimes poses, for doctors, a profound ethical test. As another Houston doctor put it to me, “Imagine a bullet is flying in your direction and you have a choice of either saving your family from being hit or saving a patient that you just met. As doctors, we’ve sacrificed a lot to be at that bedside when women need us the most, but you ask us to let our family take the bullet for somebody that we don’t know? Most people would draw the line.”” And the line that sums up the situation in Texas succinctly… “It wasn’t until a doctor tore his gloves off, sourly threw them away, and spoke his mind that [Lauren] Miller [one of five women suing the state of Texas] confirmed what she had feared all along. “I can’t help you,” the doctor told her. “You need to leave the state.” Livestock gets better care in Texas than women.