I’m an emergency room doctor, and Florida’s six-week abortion ban endangers lives | Opinion
I’m an emergency physician in Miami, and I see pregnant patients every day.
Sometimes we discover new pregnancies. I tell my patients news that changes their lives. We talk through their options. I ask if they want to explore prenatal care, or if they’d like to consider termination, or if they just need time to process how their world has shifted.
But when Florida rolls out its six-week abortion ban on May 1, we can’t do this anymore.
A “six-week” pregnancy is actually about four weeks old. Pregnancies aren’t dated by the age of the embryo. A ban on abortions after six weeks effectively bans abortions altogether.
Pregnancy is one of the most dangerous endeavors that a young healthy woman can undergo. The risk of domestic violence increases when a woman is pregnant, and homicide is a leading cause of death for pregnant women.
Our country has an unreasonably high maternal mortality rate, and Black women suffer most. All of these risks feel more intense for our pediatric patients, some of whom are too young to truly understand.
Pregnancy reroutes blood vessels, compresses the vital organs in the belly, and changes how blood cells bind together, which can lead to devastating blood clots.
Pregnancy can put a woman on bedrest for months, cause life-threatening infections, and lead to seizures. My job trains me to be ready for these emergencies, and I hope that my patients never face them. Pregnancy changes everything about a body, and people should be able to choose if or when they are pregnant.
In the emergency department, my patients also include women who wanted their pregnancy so very much. I hear their stories, examine the bleeding, review ultrasound images, and often diagnose early pregnancy loss. I tell them that at least one in four pregnancies end in miscarriage. I let them know they aren’t alone and that there’s nothing they could have done differently. Then we talk about their options. We can wait and let the miscarriage pass on its own, which four out of five women will do within two months.
We can give them medications that help them pass the miscarriage in about three days. Or they can schedule an appointment with an OBGYN for a short procedure, but the wait times for this vary quite a bit.
The medications we use to treat miscarriage in the emergency department are misoprostol and mifepristone. These medications are safe, and research shows that this combination is the most effective regimen we have. They’re also the same medications used for abortion. Mifepristone is heavily regulated, and there are already multiple barriers to administering it in the emergency department.
Recently, arguments against mifepristone have been heard in front of the Supreme Court. That ruling will not only impact abortion care, but will affect our ability to care for miscarriages too.
These laws have created so much confusion, and women end up paying the price. We see heartbreaking headlines over and over again. A woman in Texas was thrown in jail two-years ago after having a miscarriage.
Even legal exceptions to abortion law put women at risk - another woman in Florida was discharged after her water broke early because she wasn’t “sick enough” to qualify for a medical exemption. She almost died from blood loss shortly after.
To our legislators in Tallahassee, the abortion ban is an abstract idea. But if they spent time in the emergency department, up close to the reality of early pregnancy, they would see what I see. And they’d know that this law hurts real women, who have real lives and real health conditions, who support real families, many of whom already have real children.
Women who have real hopes and dreams, who deserve real dignity and real peace, deserve so much better than this.
Juhi Varshney is an emergency physician in Miami.
