The Abortion Wars Continue
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Photo by Nathaniel St. Clair
“Mrs. Porsha Evette Ngumezi, 35 passed away at Houston Methodist Hospital in Sugarland, TX on June 12, 2023.” So reports the All Families Mortuary.
What the announcement did not report was that over the course of six hours the previous day Porsha had bled so much in the emergency department at Houston Methodist Sugar Land Hospital that she’d needed two transfusions. According to a nurse’s notes, she was “passing large clots the size of grapefruit.” Her husband, Hope Ngumezi, called his mother, a former physician, who told them that, “You need a D&C.” She recommended a “dilation and curettage” procedure because it is often given for first-trimester miscarriages or abortions for it could remove the remaining tissue from Porsha’s uterus and stop the bleeding.
Dr. Andrew Ryan Davis, the obstetrician on duty, informed the couple that it was hospital’s “routine” to give patients “misoprostol,” a drug to induce second trimester fetal death or termination of pregnancy and can also reduce the risk of stomach ulcers. Hope later reported that he trusted the doctor and his wife took the pills. But the bleeding continued, and Porsha died three hours later.
On June 24, 2022, the Supreme Court issued its Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health that overturned its landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. One month later, on August 25th, Texas adopted “Chapter 170A” to its Health & Safety Code that “prohibits a person from performing, inducing, or attempting an abortion.” Exceptions include when a patient’s life or major bodily function is at risk. However, many doctors say they don’t know how to interpret that clause and, if they make the wrong call, they could face prison time, thousands of dollars in fines and loss of their medical license.
Porsha’s is the fifth case of a woman dying after they did not receive a D&C or its second-trimester equivalent; three of those deaths were in Texas.
In August 2024, Tabitha Crowe, a Florida resident, was visiting her parents in Louisiana, when she started miscarrying her first pregnancy. She woke up one morning covered in blood and her parents drove her to the nearby LSU Health Lallie Kemp Medical Center hospital while she suffered ongoing blood loss in their car’s back seat. After returning to her parents’ home, she again felt horrible pains and went to Lallie Kemp who transferred her to St. Tammany Parish Hospital Emergency Department because it was the closest hospital with an OB/GYN unit.
On the same day the Supreme Court issued its Dobbs decision, Louisiana began enforcing its “trigger ban” that prohibits abortion at all stages of pregnancy. Its actions followed shortly after the Supreme Court issued its Dobbs decision in 2022 overturning Roe in 2022. And it was the first state to reclassify two abortion and miscarriage medications — mifepristone and misoprostol — as controlled substances, even though they haven’t been shown to cause addiction or dependence.
According to one report, “She [Crowe] was also (allegedly unbeknownst to her) administered misoprostol, a drug used to treat miscarriage that is also the second drug of the two-drug abortion pill regimen.” Crowe said she passed baseball-sized blood clots and experienced extreme pain and dizziness in two different hospitals, while never being offered a common miscarriage procedure, a D&C.
“I had a sense it was because of the abortion laws, because by the time they did the canal sweep of blood clots, they didn’t even want to listen that I was in pain anymore. They were like, brushing it off, like, you’ll be fine,” Crowe said. “Even if them not doing it was wasn’t because of the abortion laws, I still didn’t get the treatment that I needed.”
“For me to have a miscarriage for the first time, it’s already a very scary process,” she said. Crowe and her husband returned to their home state of Florida, where they went to the emergency room on Eglin Air Force Base where she said she was given a D&C. “You go to a hospital, you expect care, you expect some type of answers on what’s going on. And I didn’t get that.”
As Donald Trump takes office as president, Texas and Louisiana have been joined by 17 other states to ban abortion (e.g., Alabama, Arkansas, Idaho and South Dakota) or restrict the procedure earlier in pregnancy (e.g., 6 weeks for Georgia, Iowa and South Carolina) than was the standard of 24 weeks under Roe.
Some Christian conservatives have backed a nationwide ban on abortion. During the 2024 presidential campaign Trump took numerous positions on a nationwide ban. In some news conference he supported a ban after 20 weeks, in another he supported a 15-week ban. However, in October, late in the campaign, he stated unequivocally his opposition to a nationwide abortion ban. “Everyone knows I would not support a federal abortion ban, under any circumstances, and would, in fact, veto it, because it is up to the states to decide based on the will of the their voters.” So, who knows what he will do?
As president, Trump can – as one source notes – invoke the 1873 Comstock law and “basically shut down almost all abortion care nationwide.”
On a second front, the Republican-controlled Congress can pass a national abortion ban that the president could sign. An indication of what might happened is suggested by the March 2024 report by the Republican Study Committee that endorsed a national abortion ban with zero exceptions for rape or incest. The committed represents 100 percent of House Republican leadership and called for support for Life at Conception Act. In addition, it called for eliminating reproductive freedom for all women in every state; calls for the end for In vitro fertilization (IVF) treatment; and the banning mifepristone.
Finally, the Supreme Court could decide that fetuses and embryos are persons under the 14thAmendment, thus override all state laws permitting abortions. In 2020, Texas passed S.B. 8 (aka Texas Heartbeat Act) that banned abortions after six weeks of gestation. In follow-up, in 2024, the Texas League of Women Voters in Amarillo promoted the “Sanctuary City for the Unborn Ordinance” that would outlaw abortions in the city’s limits. Similar laws were adopted in Lubbock, Abilene and San Angelo.
However, the Supreme Court heard oral argument regarding Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. FDA, in which anti-abortion groups sought to overturn the FDA’s decisions approving the medical use of mifepristone. On June 13, 2024, the Court ruled that the Alliance lacked Article III standing to challenge the FDA’s approval or rule making. The decision reversed the Fifth Circuit ruling and lifted the injunction. Nevertheless, further efforts will likely follow.
So, sadly, the abortion wars continue.
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