“It is from the Bible that man has learned cruelty, rapine, and murder; for the belief of a cruel God makes a cruel man.” ― Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason
In a civilized world, someone with a critical and potentially fatal condition receives immediate and appropriate medical care. Doctors do as their oath and training mandate. The law unquestionably supports them. And politics is irrelevant.
But Texas is not in the civilized world. And pregnant women are medically second-class citizens. Just ask Kelsie Norris-De La Cruz.
In early January, the 25-year-old University of Texas senior took a pregnancy test. It was positive. Kelsie and her boyfriend were ecstatic. Like expectant parents everywhere, they dreamt of a future enriched by a child.
“We made jokes all the time like, ‘Maybe he’ll be a competitive chess player,’” Norris-De La Cruz said. “We thought the possibility of creating something that was a unity of us was really beautiful."
It was not to be.
Within a week, Norris-De La Cruz started to cramp and bleed. On Jan 14th, she went to the emergency room. Doctors checked her hormone levels and performed an ultrasound. They told her to come back in 48 hours. Two days later, her hormone levels had cratered. Doctors suspected a “failed early pregnancy.”
However, they could not rule out the possibility of an ectopic pregnancy — a condition in which a fetus fails to travel to the uterus and instead implants in a fallopian tube. It is currently impossible to re-implant the developing embryo in the womb. And there is no chance the pregnancy will last to term.
Sometimes nature resolves the condition. The fetus does not develop, and the unfortunate woman miscarries. Failing that, doctors can inject the patient with methotrexate — which stops the pregnancy from growing. In the worst cases, a doctor will have to surgically remove the fetus and the fallopian tube.
If doctors deny the treatment, the woman’s life is at grave risk.
For a month after her January ER visit, Norris-De La Cruz experienced bouts of abdominal pain so severe that even standing up was hard. She thought she might have appendicitis or a urinary tract infection. Finally, she went to the health center on her campus at the University of Texas at Arlington on Feb 12th. A nurse told her to go straight to the emergency room.
There, she was denied the treatment she needed, despite it being apparent to some doctors at the time — and to other experts who reviewed her records later — that she was in danger of dying.
Two OB/GYNS at Texas Health Arlington Memorial Hospital evaluated her. They refused to terminate the pregnancy, saying there was some chance the pregnancy was still viable. And they advised her and her mother to go home and wait.
Between the two OB/GYN consults a different on-call doctor, who specialized in emergency medicine, also reviewed her tests and ultrasound scans. He disagreed with the first OB/GYN’s decision to discharge her. As he wrote in the records:
“I do not feel comfortable discharging her home and do not think that is in her best interest,”
Unfortunately, he was not permitted to do the surgery himself. The procedure required an OB/GYN. But he did recommend she remain in the hospital overnight.
The following morning, Norris-De La Cruz was again denied treatment by a second OB/GYN, who determined that there was “no operation warranted,” according to records. That OB/GYN discharged her and told her to follow up in 48 hours.
Meanwhile, Kelsie's mother, Stephanie Lloyd, was trying to find an abortion provider in the state who could help her — with no success.
Finally, after texting a photo of her troubling sonogram to a friend who was on the way to see her OB/GYN, Ms Norris-De La Cruz was able to see a doctor, Jeffery Morgan, who immediately identified it as an ectopic pregnancy.
He performed emergency surgery 24 hours later at a different hospital in the area, at which point her ectopic pregnancy had already started to rupture. Dr. Morgan said that if Norris-De La Cruz had waited much longer, she would have been “in extreme danger of losing her life.”
Two days after receiving the needed and potentially life-saving surgery, Kelsie expressed her relief. And what had already been emotionally devastating had not been even worse.
“I was scared I was going to ... lose my entire reproductive system if they waited too long. I knew it could happen at any moment.”
Why was there any question about Norris-De La Cruz receiving the treatment she needed? Blame the pro-forced birth zealotry of the misnomered “pro-life” conservatives. As soon as the Supreme Court overturned Roe in their Dodds decision, Texas banned almost all abortions. Technically, the law did allow exceptions to save the life of the mother, but the language was so vague that doctors denied treatment to women who needed it.
As the Texas Tribune reported:
“State law says treatments for miscarriages, known as “spontaneous abortions” in medicine, and ectopic pregnancies, in which a fertilized egg grows outside of the uterus and becomes unviable, do not count as illegal abortions. However, several reports revealed medical providers delayed medical care for these conditions due to confusion or the threat of jail time and six-figure fines for medical professionals.”
Texas legislators, realizing that they had a PR disaster on their hands — and possibly because some of them give a damn about women — passed a bill in June 2023 that now gives a legal defense to health care providers who exercise “reasonable judgment in providing medical treatment” for an “ectopic pregnancy at any location” or a “pre-viable premature rupture of membranes,” which is when a pregnant patient’s amniotic fluid breaks before a fetus is determined to be able to survive outside of the uterus.
But even with this clarification, OB/GYNs are still so terrified of being sent to jail that some still will not give women with non-viable and injurious pregnancies the treatment they need to preserve their reproductive futures and possibly their lives.
This fear will surely dampen the desire of medical students in Texas to specialize in OB/GYN. Making it likely that Texan women with viable pregnancies, and women in general, will find it harder to get healthcare.
Will red-state America eventually come to its senses and treat women as full citizens? I do not know. But if it does, it will not be before some die under the immoral dictates of sanctimonious sociopaths lacking the empathy to see the humanity in their fellow Americans.
It may seem incredible in the 21st century that there are still people beholden to their interpretation of texts written by superstitious ancients with no more than a rudimentary understanding of their world, whose explanation for the inexplicable was a judgy, capricious, and vainglorious God with anger management issues.
We should not be surprised. These people are the descendants of Americans who thought owning dark-skinned people was not only their God-given right but was a boon for the chained and whipped workers — who were better off for their enslavement.
This cruel rationalizing is the thinking that condemns pregnant women to jeopardy.
