![]() ![]() “The ethics and the morality of that are just absurd. “We’re now bound and gagged from actually doing what we are trained to do,” Kumar said. “There are no ethics when we have to abide by a law that is in opposition to everything we know, all of our training, all of our understanding about actually taking care of patients and providing care.” īhavik Kumar, who practices family medicine and is a former abortion provider, is facing similar dilemmas in Houston. She and her colleagues are left with “a lot of anger and frustration, and feeling like patients are not able to get the care that they deserve.” Ĭombs and other doctors said they are now forced to provide a lower quality of medical care to patients. The laws have not only prohibited access to elective pregnancy termination, but they’ve also obstructed the path for timely and medically appropriate care for many Texans experiencing pregnancy complications. Unsurprisingly, the woman developed a serious infection that kept her in the hospital for another day.įor many expectant mothers, the state’s abortion laws have turned what is already a devastating reality-the loss of a wanted pregnancy-into an even more excruciating and sometimes life-threatening process. She could only coach her patient-emotionally distraught and physically in pain-through another 12 hours of labor to deliver a baby that couldn’t and didn’t survive. ![]() Those options include counsel for pregnancy termination through a surgical procedure as well as the prescription of Misoprostol, a labor-inducing medication that is also used as an abortion medication in the first trimester. īut now, “Basically when the mother’s water breaks before viability, if there’s a heartbeat, you’re not allowed to do anything,” Combs explained. “Previously, we would call this an inevitable miscarriage or inevitable pregnancy loss and offer the patient options to help the process along in order to minimize risk of infection for the mother,” Combs said. Her child had a heartbeat but was several weeks away from being strong enough to survive outside the womb. By the time Combs got to her, she’d been laboring for 48 hours. Her water had broken prematurely, and she’d gone into labor much too early. Her patient, 19 weeks along in her first pregnancy, was in bad shape. Shanna Combs, an OB-GYN, waded into that minefield a few months ago while on her shift at a maternity care hospital in Fort Worth. As a result, medical decisions regarding pregnancy complications now involve a host of new stakeholders-hospital administrators and lawyers-who may put questions of institutional risk above patient well-being. ĭr. The stakes couldn’t be higher: risking major fines and up to life in prison for doctors on one side, and on the other, often putting women’s lives at risk because of delays in care or refusals to provide formerly routine procedures. Physicians are finding themselves torn between providing medically appropriate care and staying in compliance with the state’s draconian anti-abortion laws. But for Texas doctors, especially obstetrician-gynecologists, following those seemingly straightforward principles has become a legal and ethical minefield. This story is part of a continuing series on the dismantling of women’s healthcare in Texas.ĭoctors have a code, a set of principles meant to guide their practice: Give care. ![]()
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