Sitting at her computer one day in late December, Dr. Sarah Osmundson mustered her best argument to approve an abortion for a suffering patient.
The woman was 14 weeks pregnant when she learned her fetus was developing without a skull. This increased the likelihood of a severe buildup of amniotic fluid, which could cause her uterus to rupture and possibly kill her. Osmundson, a maternal-fetal medicine specialist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center who helps patients navigate high-risk pregnancies, knew that outcome was uncommon, but she had seen it happen.
She drafted an email to her colleagues on the Nashville hospital’s abortion committee, arguing that the risk was significant enough to meet the slim exception to Tennessee’s strict abortion ban, which allows termination only when “necessary to prevent the death of the pregnant woman or to prevent serious risk of substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function.” She pleaded with her fellow doctors to spare this woman the […]
As usual, ProPublica provides an excellent detailed examination of the consequences of depriving women of the ability to make decisions regarding their own body. These States and their citizens will be suffering from the poor decisions of their legislators for decades to come. This will make the lives of women who live in these places miserable. If the photo topping the article was of a military helicopter hovering over the hospital it would have been a truer image of the developing reality.