by striatic
Abortion needs to be taught in our medical schools
[Via Pharyngula]
Read this horror story of a failed pregnancy.
I was taking an afternoon nap when the hemorrhaging started while my toddler napped in his room when I woke up to find blood gushing upward from my body. Though I didn’t know it at the time, I was experiencing a placental abruption, a complication my doctor had told me was a possibility. My husband was at work, so I had to do my best to take care of me and my toddler on my own. I managed to get to the phone and make arrangements for both of my children before going to a Chicago hospital.
Everyone knew the pregnancy wasn’t viable, that it couldn’t be viable given the amount of blood I was losing, but it still took hours for anyone at the hospital to do anything. The doctor on call didn’t do abortions. At all. Ever. In fact, no one on call that night did. Meanwhile, an ignorant batch of medical students had gathered to study me — one actually showed me the ultrasound of our dying child while asking me if it was a planned pregnancy. Several wanted to examine me while I lay there bleeding and in pain. No one gave me anything for the pain or even respected my request to close the door even though I was on the labor and delivery floor listening to other women have healthy babies as the baby I had been trying to save died in my womb.
Fortunately, a nurse called in a competent doctor to abort the fetus and stop the bleeding — or this woman would have been dead.
[More]
The House passed legislation this week which would ban ALL health centers that receive any Federal money from teaching abortion techniques. The bill itself states that no Federal money “shall be used to provide any abortion or training in the provision of abortions.”
Almost any medical event which results in the loss of pregnancy is an abortion of some sort. A miscarriage is medically known as a spontaneous abortion. D&C and D&X are known as medical abortions.
To a doctor, an abortion refers to the type of medical procedure used to induce the end of a pregnancy, whether for elective or for therapeutic reasons.
So how is a clinic supposed to separate out the techniques used for elective abortions and those used for therapeutic when they are the same procedures? It can’t.
Medical facilities are already failing to teach the techniques that are used in abortion, even though the same procedures are used every day to save the lives of women.
Only about 50 of the 130 medical schools in the US offer any abortion training. Soon it could be none. For a legal medical procedure.
This is about 2700 pregnancies a year. Thousands of women a year who would die without doctors who know how to properly abort a dying or dead fetus.
And what about the huge number of women whose incomplete miscarriages are now dealt with using the same techniques used in abortions? What happens to them when no one knows how to do the procedure?
America already has a horrible maternal mortality rate, compared to much of the world. Serbia and UAE (8.6 per 100,000 live births) vs. the US (17 per 100,000). Virtually all of Europe is better than the US. Italy has the lowest maternal mortality rates in the world – 3.9 per 100,000) – one quarter of the US.
And the rate in the US is actually increasing instead of the decrease seen in the rest of the world.
The current political climate, which seeks to impose political ideology on medical decisions, does not seem likely to reverse the horrible direction of maternal mortality rates in the US.
That is what the House has now voted for. Thousands of women who will lose lives. Thousands of families who will lose a mother.
All because the House wants to prevent doctors from being taught a legal procedure that saves lives.
