How Almost Dead Does a Pregnant Woman Have to Be?
State legislatures that are creating harsh laws about women’s bodies and those laws’ very real future existence no longer mention the health of the pregnant woman, only her life. This has caused unbelievable conflict, personal and professional, for medical workers who now have to sit on their expert health knowledge along with their hands. Now we have another player in the over-medicalized business of obstetrics-- legal teams who are called on to make decisions over the life and death of a real, live, breathing person with an embryo or fetus growing inside her. (One that a man put there for her.) How “almost dead” does a person have to be? Lawyers decide. What a boon to the legal profession the Dobb’s decision has created!
I had four miscarriages. I guess I should say, “luckily” more than 30 years ago. Three required medical interventions. Two of my four completed pregnancies (babies) were complicated to the extent that they required my bed rest and hormones. The last one occurred when I had three other children to care for. At least doctors finally figured out why I kept miscarrying with the fourth one. But no one, not one medical person, was required to stand by and watch me bleed. No one had to seek permission from a lawyer to decide whether I could be given a D&C to remove the dead fetus bits. I desperately wanted children. These miscarriages were so devastating. I was worried that something would go wrong and I wouldn’t ever be able to carry a pregnancy. I join millions of women who wonder what they could have faced in a country or state today instead of when pregnancy was a health condition and not a political one.
What good has ever come from criminalizing ever more behaviors, from bringing the legal and criminal justice system into yet another part of American life -- from negating the right of pregnant women to live as the rest of humankind can? Criminalizing the behavior of women has been a national sport for centuries. Now the government is up women’s uteruses and inside our bodies. The same “limited” government bad lawmakers depend on to vehemently curtail interference in people’s lives when it comes to rights to own and use guns for perceived self-defense. The same “small” government they depend on to ignore legal protections against violating, harassing, and threatening women; eviscerate non-discriminatory public education. The same government they depend on to keep their churches rich and powerful through tax exemptions, to reduce their taxes, and keep them out of jail for their white-collar crimes. Republicans see a government meant to be used as a means to any end they desire, just like women are. When it gets them what they want, they are all for an interfering government. When it steps on their little toes, they rise up against it.
Women’s health professionals have to consult lawyers of hospitals, whose responsibility is to the hospital not patients unless a lawsuit is likely, as women lie bleeding and in pain waiting to be helped. Some doctors have to consult with their private lawyers to ensure they are not putting themselves in legal jeopardy, including the very real risk of massive fines and incarceration. Can you imagine your doctor having to consult a lawyer to determine how close to dying you are? Whether she can help you survive and maintain your health to live another day and take care of the children you already have? Is there a test, a rain-gauge-like instrument, that measures whether a pregnant woman’s death is days, hours, or minutes away? Does everyone wait, watch, and not intervene until the minute when only swift action will possibly keep her from dying? And this is health care? Freedom to bleed and die, but not to excise the cause?
When a person suffers a heart attack, does the doctor consult with lawyers before trying to save his life? Does the doctor have to wait until the victim is past some stage of severity before the doctor can intervene? Maybe it will be fine. Maybe it isn’t all that serious. How about a gunshot victim? No removing slugs, stopping the bleeding, performing surgery, sewing up the wound until the lawyers have checked to be sure it can all be avoided since the victim is not unconscious? We can wait and see whether he takes a turn for the worst. What about that child who was hit by a car? See how it goes for a few days before helping, until the lawyers agree that death is imminent? Who would stand for that barbaric, paternalistic, misogynistic, and positively mean behavior? What man would stand for that, if it were he or his already living and breathing child suffering? What legislator would allow such an indignity and dismissive treatment, so much blood, to be his to endure?
Pregnancy is a health event. Just to get pregnant and stay pregnant is unlikely because of chance and circumstances. Miscarriages happen more often than we know. Embryos do not form properly. They may not find a hospitable uterus or have the hormones needed to implant. But if she stays pregnant, the process changes the workings of her body. The body harbors and sustains an embryo to become a fetus and a fetus to become a baby. A woman eats more to nourish the embryo and herself to be able to support it. She curtails some activities to save her energy. She avoids taking risks if she can. She incubates this parasitical little thing for 40 weeks – 40 weeks! If she is lucky and insured, she sees a medical practitioner to ensure that all is right with her body and the developing fetus. She is usually delivered by the medical establishment and both she and the infant are assessed for health and vitality. Her breasts leak. She bleeds. She cramps. She is exhausted. She may use her breasts, whose purpose is solely to nourish an infant, to feed it many times a day, with much discomfort until she gets used to it. It takes a several weeks to feel more normal again, after this long experience of not feeling like herself or feeling like someone different. Her shape takes even longer to resume, if it ever does. There is no instant or even quick recovery after thirty or more pounds mostly in the abdomen is added. Hormones are all over the place.
Multiple state legislators and candidates for office no longer even give lip service to pretending to care about the health of a pregnant woman. They only care whether her pregnancy might kill her before the treasured fetus can grow enough inside its incubating vessel to be born and maybe live, maybe have a life as a functioning human being, maybe not. Given the danger women face when a pregnant woman is in medical trouble, given our dreadful maternal health statistics, given the American mean-spirited health care of women-as-means-to-an-end, a woman left uncared for in an emergency room looks like criminal negligence to me. What is the end goal of the self-righteous who are damned determined to refuse to allow women to live in any capacity except as they believe women should live?
Maybe the next thing will be to codify levels of emergencies just for pregnant women. It is known that doctors in general (Not All Doctors) and male (Not All Men) doctors in specific do not think women are very capable of knowing their own pain. I mean, you (lawmakers, physicians, and lawyers) know how hysterical women can get. Women cry and writhe make scenes, so you can’t use that to gauge their pain, fear or trauma. They can’t be trusted because they are so emotional. You can measure blood loss, but once a woman is in an emergency room, you don’t know how much blood might have been running out of her before she got there. Her waters may break too early, and infection is too real a next step, but it takes a few hours or days for it to get bad enough to be noted, and then is difficult to control. Her fetus might be malformed and unable to grow, but that will be her problem one day, not yours as a lawyer or the doctor. Her reproductive organs, her heart, her other internal organs may get damaged, but that is not your concern, either. If she isn’t about to lose consciousness, she is still able to give that fetus life. Maybe. That is what she exists for.
Everything is wrong with this picture, this growing reality. The reasons are few and aggressively authoritarian. Pregnancy is always a girl’s or woman’s fault. If she didn’t refuse the sperm-implanter, or make sure the sperm did not reach her egg, or take care of her “problem” before it became one, it’s too bad for her.
Men make the rules for women to live by. Men need women to be compliant, and if women refuse, then men and their Christian, submissive, obedient women will criminalize what all women do with their bodies and what their bodies do with them.
Not letting this go. We can’t. Make noise. Make a lot of noise and don’t stop.
Watch this fascinating panel of women lawyers, doctors, and academics discuss this.
Such a horrifying reality we live in