Bleeding and in pain, Kyleigh Thurman didn’t know her doomed pregnancy could kill her.
Emergency room doctors at Ascension Seton Williamson in Texas handed her a pamphlet on miscarriage and told her to “let nature take its course” before discharging her without treatment for her ectopic pregnancy.
When the 25-year-old returned three days later, still bleeding, doctors finally agreed to give her an injection intended to end the pregnancy. But it was too late. The fertilized egg growing on Thurman’s fallopian tube would rupture it, destroying part of her reproductive system.
That’s according to a complaint Thurman and the Center for Reproductive Rights filed last week asking the government to investigate whether the hospital violated a federal law when staff failed to treat her initially in February 2023.
“I was left to flail,” Thurman said. “It was nothing short of being misled.”
Even as the Biden administration has publicly warned hospitals to treat pregnant patients in emergencies, facilities continue to violate the federal law.
More than 100 pregnant women in medical distress who sought help from emergency rooms were turned away or negligently treated since 2022, an Associated Press analysis of federal hospital investigations has found.
First of all, obviously the best strategy is actually fixing the problem by throwing out the misogynist christofascist nutjob GOP and repealing their insane laws.
But I want to talk about the next-best strategy: we need an organized legal campaign to actively and aggressively make it even riskier/more expensive for doctors to engage in negligence or malpractice by refusing treatment than it is for them to risk “violating” the aforementioned insane laws by performing treatment. They need to be more scared of our retaliation against them for not doing their goddamn job than they are of the nutjobs’ retaliation against them for doing it.
I understand that putting even more pressure on doctors and trapping them in a potentially untenable position is not great. But their comfort is not as important as their patients’ health, so there is really no alternative.
We also need to organize things like legal defense funds – along with, perhaps, more “extralegal” tactics – to defend doctors who do act right.