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this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2024
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Leopards Ate My Face
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Your opinion matters as much as mine, the HHS secretary said they're in the wrong, and it would have been 100% legal by the letter of the law.
That's a misinterpretation of EMTALA and the words of the HHS secretary.
They didn't say that they would protect providers who perform abortions. They said they would seek civil punishment for those that do not. That's very different from providing protection.
See my comment above for more details.
There were multiple hospitals involved and cited for failing to treat her. One excerpt from one medical report doesn't refute that. The HHS secretary explicitly said that, under the federal EMTALA, hospitals are required to provide emergency care, which they did not.
The HHS secretary can say whatever they want. It doesn't mean they know how things will play out in court. Hospitals employ leagues of lawyers to assess legal risk/exposure and with criminal penalties on the table in all of the 14 states where abortion is banned, it appears that they've determined its better to pay the fine than have many of their doctors and nurses go to jail.
Nobody has been prosecuted for this since Dobbs. Your alleged legal threat is barely even fiction. The lawyers were wrong in this case, and those who judged it legally acceptable to provide emergency abortions in ban states are right. You are ignoring these obvious facts to hold onto the nonsensical belief that these laws are unjust.
Let's leave aside that a surgeon cannot operate without the infrastructure a hospital makes available to them in most cases. OR space, equipment, scrub nurses etc. If hospital management decides the risk is too high, the surgeon/obstetrician's hand are tied.
Let's say that's not an issue. Would you risk your career and livelihood in this scenario? It's easy to talk a big game but the vast majority of people would not. I can't blame them. I blame the legislators and those that elected them.
Hospital management was 100% wrong in this case, but sure, let's put that aside. Yes, 10,000 times out of 10,000, I would prematurely deliver a baby if it was necessary and I had the means to do so, or do any other procedure that wasn't meant to explicitly kill the fetus. If it was already dead, there would be no distinction there. If I had no moral compunction with abortion in general, 10,000 times out of 10,000, I would perform an abortion if I believed it medically necessary.