Thread by @CAKitchener

Last month, I heard about a TX woman with an ectopic pregnancy who was turned away by her doctor, then her ER. Ectopics must be terminated immediately or the patient can die.

She drove 12+ hours to New Mexico.

I wanted to understand how that happened 🧵thelily.com/the-texas-abor…

The TX ban does have a medical exception — but it’s narrow and extremely vague. Doctors are allowed to perform abortions in a “medical emergency.” SB 8 says little about how that’s defined.

Though an ectopic is widely considered an emergency, doctors worry that, legally, it may be unclear WHEN it becomes an “emergency.”

An ectopic becomes most urgent once the fallopian tube (where the fetus is growing) ruptures. But most docs want to intervene before that happens.

Alan Braid criticized this aspect of the law when I asked him about it.

“Do you have to wait until it’s about to rupture? Until it has? How do you make that decision under this law?”

When the woman with the ectopic pregnancy called the @NatAbortionFed hotline, she told them her doctor said they couldn’t perform the procedure because they were “nervous” about getting sued.

Other states use much more specific language in their gestational bans. SB 8 leaves doctors wondering, and scared.

SB 8’s medical exception is also narrower than those in many other states. Patients with preexisting conditions that make their pregnancies more dangerous — pulmonary hypertension, certain heart conditions — likely wouldn’t be covered.

While the woman with the ectopic was able to get treatment in NM, doctors said that kind of delay could have cost her her life.

If a patient shows up with signs of an ectopic, one doc told me, “You do not have time to send her to another hospital, much less out of state.”