A doctor said her “blood boiled” over Samuel Alito’s comments in a Supreme Court decision on abortion, and she took issue with terminations being compared to experimental cancer treatment.
Discussing this with MSNBC, Dr. Kavita Patel said: “We’re not talking about offering abortions on demand, we’re talking about medical care. So those comments by Justice Alito just make my blood boil.”
On Wednesday, a Supreme Court opinion in Moyle v. United States, a case challenging Idaho’s near-total abortion ban, was accidentally published. The document, revealed by Bloomberg before it was officially released on Thursday, essentially moved to allow hospitals to perform emergency abortions before a pregnant woman is on the brink of death.
Along with justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, Samuel Alito dissented, arguing that doctors should also consider the health of the “unborn child” at equal weight, until the life of the mother is in jeopardy under federal law.
In trying to argue that a woman’s right to consent to treatments during pregnancy does not constitute the right to choose an abortion, he made a comparison to cancer patients using experimental drugs.
He wrote: “The right to refuse medical treatment without consent does not entail the right to demand treatment that is prohibited by law. Cancer patients have the right to refuse treatment that their doctors recommend, but they do not have a right to obtain whatever treatment they want, such as the administration of a drug that cannot legally be used in this country. Likewise here, a woman’s right to withhold consent to treatment related to her pregnancy does not mean that she can demand an abortion.”
Dr. Patel added: “We’re not talking about on-demand health care. Making that analogy to cancer is disrespectful to cancer patients and to people, and what we’re really talking about is just access to care.”
She went on to give an example of “what’s happening on the ground.”
She said: “A pregnant patient might actually come to the emergency doctor’s office for a variety of reasons, high blood pressure, bleeding. Or one of the most common things in the emergency rooms—it happened 54 times at St Luke’s Bois Idaho Hospital last year—is that a patient’s water breaks before a fetus can live outside of the womb, around or before 20-22 weeks of gestation. After the water breaks, there’s usually a fetal heartbeat, but you can have infection quickly spread. You and I have talked about sepsis, which is life-threatening. Without a ban in place, what normally would happen is that the doctor would likely recommend termination of the pregnancy to avoid sepsis and the death—or potential death of the mother—and the fetus. With this ban, what is happening today is that specialists are having to make a judgment call, having to think about talking to administration and, in many cases, having to send a patient out of state—keep in mind the nearest place they can send them to is Portland or Seattle and that’s about eight hours away…”
Under the Idaho law, a medical exception only applies when a doctor judges that “the abortion was necessary to prevent the death of the pregnant woman.” There are also exceptions for rape or incest, but only in the first trimester and only if the person files a police report.
