Putting a face on yesterday's Supreme Court decision

Written by: Sheri Divers on Apr 19, 2007 10:09 AM EDT

Jessica Stites is Editorial Assistant at Ms. Magazine:

Yesterday's ruling upheld Bush’s ban on the D&X (dilation & extraction) abortion procedure. Its language, however, is vague enough to potentially outlaw D&E (dilation and evacuation), the procedure used in 95% of post-first trimester abortions. No exception was provided for the health of women.

But what does that mean in real-life terms?

One answer comes from Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Martha Mendoza, who in 2004 learned that her 19-week-old fetus was dead in her womb. Even then — just months after the ban was first passed -- it was already becoming difficult to find a doctor willing and able to perform a D&E. Martha Mendoza tells of her struggle to find one in her lucid, heart-wrenching Summer 2004 Ms. essay  "Between a Woman and her Doctor”:

“...I’d been through labor and delivery three times before, with great joy as well as pain, and the notion of going through that profound experience only to deliver a dead fetus (whose skin was already starting to slough off, whose skull might be collapsing) was horrifying.

I also did some research, spoke with friends who were obstetricians and gynecologists, and quickly learned this: Study after study shows D&Es are safer than labor and delivery. Women who had D&Es were far less likely to have bleeding requiring transfusion, infection requiring intravenous antibiotics, organ injuries requiring additional surgery or cervical laceration requiring repair and hospital readmission.

A review of 300 second- trimester abortions published in 2002 in the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology found that 29 percent of women who went through labor and delivery had complications, compared with just 4 percent of those who had D&Es.

... [But] the years of angry debate that led to the passage [of the 2003 abortion procedure ban], restrictive state laws and the violence targeting physicians have reduced the number of hospitals and doctors willing to do dilations and evacuations (D&Es) and dilations and extractions (intact D&Es), which involve removing a larger fetus, sometimes in pieces, from the womb.
 

... After examining me and confirming I was bleeding but not hemorrhaging, the attending obstetrician, obviously pregnant herself, defensively explained that only one of their dozens of obstetricians and gynecologists still does D&Es, and he was simply not available.

Not today. Not tomorrow. Not the next day.”

Read the article in full: http://www.msmagazine.com/summer2004/womanandherdoctor.asp

-Jessica Stites

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