After Roe V. Wade was overturned in June 2022 many cases show women dying due to them being denied an abortion. Most of these cases have taken place in Texas due to the Senate Bill 8 (SB 8) which is the Texas Heartbeat Act prohibiting a woman from getting an abortion after six weeks due to the fetus having a heartbeat. However, what would happen if the fetus doesn’t have a heartbeat after six weeks? Will the women be forced to carry it? Will she be able to get it removed? These are the questions that many people keep asking and I will be talking about all the outcomes with this situation and the new abortion bans that prohibit a woman from getting abortion like medication or procedure for a miscarriage.
Amanda is a 35-year-old woman from Texas, and she had a miscarriage in the first three months of her pregnancy and had to get a surgical procedure done to remove the tissue from a failed pregnancy. The hospital she went to was called Baylor Scott & White Medical Center and when she woke up from the anesthesia there was a card signed by all the nurses along with a pink and blue bracelet with a butterfly charm as a gift from the hospital to mourn for Amanda’s loss.
Eight months later Amanda had another miscarriage after three months being pregnant and went to the same hospital to get help due to the amount of pain she was in, passing a large blood clot. However, when she asked to get the same procedure done as last time, which is dilation and curettage, the hospital refused to help her.
This is because during the time between Amanda’s two miscarriages the Texas Heartbeat Act was put in place. The hospital however never mentioned this law because it is not straight forward on what counts as an abortion and what’s not. Therefore, they could not say as to why they are sending her home because they are not sure themselves if removing the tissue would count as an abortion, causing the doctors and nurses to get in trouble. So, they sent her home with instructions as to only return if blood filled her diaper more than once an hour. When she was home with this new information she was in excruciating pain and one night she was in the bathtub crying and holding her husband’s hand while she was bathing in dark red bathwater due to her bleeding for over 48 hours with large blood clots.
The hospital did decline to talk about whether this Texas abortion law goes against medical care or not and they said: “While we are not able to speak about an individual’s case due to privacy laws, our multidisciplinary team of clinicians works together to determine the appropriate treatment plan on an individual case-by-case basis. The health and safety of our patients is our top priority” (The New York Times, 2022).
This sad story about a woman being denied the medical care that she needs which would have been an abortion like procedure shows the scary and real things that these women must go through as of now that Roe v. Wade was overturned. Almost half of the states have now banned abortions, but even though it is “pro-choice” it can kill the mother, and it has before and Amanda was not the first and will not be the last who was denied abortion due to the dangers of it.
ShoutOut! James Madison University 