Originally published at: Texas' abortion laws scare doctors out of even speaking about care | Boing Boing
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System working as intended I see.
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I love where I live but if doing my job ethically means I might go to jail, it’s time to leave.
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Sounds like TX needs a Doctor strike
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I know it is easy for me to say this because I am not a doctor, but they really need to unite on this issue (or enough of them do) because 1) they can’t do their job under these laws, and 2) you can’t lock up half of your state’s doctors.
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This is the part of the story that stands out for me:
When she returned to Dallas and continued her prenatal care, she found herself navigating silence around abortion. She wondered, if the ultrasound technician knew she’d traveled out of state for an abortion, could she get reported? “You don’t know where anybody stands, so it feels like we’re all kind of talking in code,” Miller says.
Emphasis mine. If people are afraid they’ll be turned in by someone in the doctor’s office they’re less likely to go to a doctor’s office. Ethically doctors should be doing what’s best for their patients because it’s the right thing to do but on a practical level, which shouldn’t be a consideration but might be the only thing that will get through to some, they’re also losing business.
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Abandoning parts of the country will not work. We need to fight this fascism where ever it’s found, or they will take the whole country. None of us are safe until all of us are safe.
Also part of the plan… medical care is for the elite, not for all of us, in their minds. If you can’t pay for care, then you should not receive it.
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Problem is, you are not just dealing with the docs. The techs who do the U/S, the nurses who room the patient and take the history, the billing and utilization review folks who go over the chart, and so on. The number of folks who have legitimate access to medical records, and without which the system would not function (such as it does), is pretty remarkable. She is right, any of those folks could take it into their head to sue her. The docs may very well be doing their best (most of us do) but the odds that someone in the system has fascist leanings? I would have to say, since I walk past cars with “Let’s Go Brandon” and “I identify as a Prius” bumper stickers walking from the parking lot every day, it’s pretty high. That’s the world we live in now, and TX and FL are in race to see who can be the most hellish.
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This whole situation reminds me of a parody of the movie “the village”
“Is this involving that of which we do not speak?”
“If we do not speak of it, why are we talking about it now?”
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This is part of why even these “exceptions” to the new anti-abortion laws are totalitarian bullshit. Sure, you might, in theory, qualify for this exception, but you’d never know it, nor would anyone allow you to act on it.
Also: dying unnecessarily in childbirth is fetishized by the kind of men who write these laws. That’s actually a positive outcome as far as they’re concerned, and they’re actively pumping out propaganda to normalize it and even make it seem heroic.
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I was going to reply with somehting about how Spartans honored women who died in childbirth. Then I looked it up.
Plutarch writes, in his Life of Lycurgus , that only men who died in battle and women who died while holding a religious office should have their name inscribed on their tombstone.[61] This would be consistent with the Spartan reputation for piety,[62] though one translation (Latte) emended the manuscript to read instead that women who died in childbirth would have named memorials, a reading which has become popular among many scholars.[63] This emendation however has lacked archaeological, literary, or epigraph evidence to support it, whereas the two surviving funerary inscriptions for Spartan women lend credence to Plutarch’s original claim that these honors were only extended to those women who died while holding religious office.[64] Spartan society was slavishly structured around the obligation of all citizens to contribute to the state, and the failure to do so garnered no acclaim. In the starkest terms, Spartan women who died in childbirth could be seen as having made no contribution to the state in their attempt and therefore, were not accorded any special status for their death. However, Sparta did place particular emphasis on religion, arguably more than any other Greek city state and therefore, it was women who died in the service of the state, by worshiping Sparta’s deities, who were honored with inscribed tombstones.[65]
TIL.
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A lot of of Americans are about to discover what happens in a society that makes it needlessly difficult for physicians and health care providers to do their work. FAAFO.
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I started to reply, and then thought “I bet Mindy has hit the note already.” Sure enough.
I’d add to this by writing, @LordInsidious, that I understand the sentiment. I do. And yet some of the work is more important than “get up and leave.” Leave it to whom? Who will counsel the teenager, afraid because they aren’t sure that their body matches up with who they really are? Who will counsel the young woman, afraid because her Christian parents will kick her out of the house if they learn than she’s in love with another she? Who will tell her “it’s OK, you’re OK, you’re normal?” If the people who do that run away, those folks, and all sorts of other normal people, will be left to the wolves.
And what does that say about the legacy of the people who lived here before us, who didn’t leave? Every single day–every day–I drive past a memorial or reminder of the Civil Rights heroes of the 1950s and 1960s. My commute yesterday happened to take me down Dexter Avenue, past the EJI, and past what is simply known as The Bus Stop. If I allow myself to be driven out of this place because a group of right-wingers want to drag us backwards, what am I saying to the people who suffered trying to fix the wrongs? “Thanks, but this is too hard?” Fuck all if I (even in my comfy white skin) don’t owe them the effort to continue on.
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Those of us who are able (and have some privilege) need to dig in here, and not just uproot ourselves and flee. I understand if people feel like they have no choice to keep themselves safe. But if we’re able, we need to stay and help, or else they will win.
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My guess is that the only thing preventing someone from within the healthcare system from doing this already is the fear of violating HIPAA.
Being a federal law, there is nothing Texas can do to protect a violator. I’m sure the Biden administration would love to make an example out of someone who thought they’d get their bounty on by violating it.
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Except someone who violated HIPAA to sue over an abortion, and then was prosecuted by the Biden administration, would be an immediate folks hero among the righties, and would be set with paying victim-gigs for a lifetime.
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And probably pardoned by a Republican president. But that could be anywhere from 2 to 20 years. Also, depending on the sentencing, the judge could rule that any money the violator earns or receives as a result of the violation must go to the victim as compensation.
Now that would be a delicious poison pill.
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