Health complications followed state abortion restrictions: research

Medical providers described being unable to provide typical medical care, sometimes to the detriment of their patients’ health, in states that implemented abortion restrictions in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, according to a new report published on Tuesday.

The report from the University of California San Francisco’s Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health represented a compilation of 50 submissions from medical providers between September 2022 and March 2023.

Doctors were sometimes forced to send patients home or delay treatment until their condition worsened significantly, according to the research, which was first reported by The Washington Post. 

One physician described sending a patient home with a condition that would have typically been treated with an abortion and seeing her two days later in the intensive care unit with severe sepsis. 

In another case, a woman who was experiencing significant bleeding was not determined to meet the state’s abortion exception to protect the life of the mother until after she had received a blood transfusion.

“Our hands are tied,” a physician said in another case in which a pregnant patient presented with bleeding. “She is hemodynamically stable. This is a threatened, not inevitable, abortion. The pregnancy may continue.”

“So we have to simply wait, either for bleeding to get worse or for her to get to viability,” the doctor added in the report.

Other doctors described being unable to provide care to patients facing severe pregnancy complications or fatal fetal anomalies and recommending care out-of-state.

However, traveling to another state for abortion care presented additional difficulties for some patients, the report found.

“[The patient’s] condition worsened during the duration of transport time,” one physician said of a pregnant woman facing a complication that could not be treated in their state. “The patient was separated from family and resources. Astronomic hospital costs.”