Ky lawmakers must add exceptions to abortion laws. Otherwise women will die. | Opinion
Alex Acquisto’s heartbreaking story about Kentucky’s abortion bans shows us the predictable consequences of banning the procedure without the exemptions that encompass the many, many things that can go wrong in a pregnancy.
Amy English was carrying a fetus without a brain, but was told she had to carry it to term. Leah Martin was left without any help when her baby was found with a fatal defect, one that might also give her cancer. Both of them were abandoned by doctors who wanted to help them but feared Kentucky’s draconian new laws if they did so.
In pregnancy, when things go wrong, they can go very wrong. The current trigger law only allows abortion to prevent a “substantial risk of death” or to “prevent the serious, permanent impairment of a life-sustaining organ of a pregnant woman.” (This does not include a uterus.) Doctors are allowed to use “reasonable medical judgment” to make these decisions, only as Acquisto found out, the decisions are being made by hospital legal teams instead. So a woman was sent home knowing that her baby would die, that it could leave her infertile, and her only means of help was to find somewhere outside of the state that could help her.
The correct fix, which we hope the Supreme Court will do soon, is to get rid of the six-week ban and put it back to around 20 weeks, when few abortions occur.
In the meantime, however, Attorney General Daniel Cameron or the General Assembly could follow another red state, Louisiana, in explicitly outlining the circumstances under which a doctor — not a lawyer — could use “reasonable medical judgment” — to end a doomed pregnancy. Cameron, who is running for governor as a “pro-life” candidate, probably won’t, which is why his allies in the General Assembly should step in for him. (They should also allow exceptions for rape and incest.)
Cameron’s office has only issued clarifications that in vitro fertilization, treatment of miscarriages, preeclampsia and ectopic pregnancies don’t violate the law, but nothing in terms of other life-threatening exceptions.
Last summer after a flurry of lawsuits over its own abortion bans, the Louisiana Department of Health released a list of conditions that would be exempt from its abortion ban. It’s worth listing them all to show how extensive such medical conditions are:
▪ achondrogenesis
▪ anencephaly
▪ acardia
▪ body stalk anomaly
▪ campomelic dysplasia
▪ craniorachischisis
▪ dysencephalia splanchnocystica (Meckel-Gruber syndrome)
▪ ectopia cordis
▪ exencephaly
▪ gestational trophoblastic neoplasia
▪ holoprosencephaly
▪ hydrops fetalis
▪ iniencephaly
▪ perinatal hypophosphatasia
▪ osteogenesis imperfecta (type 2)
▪ renal agenesis (bilateral)
▪ short rib polydactyly syndrome
▪ sirenomelia
▪ thanatophoric dysplasia
▪ triploidy
▪ trisomy 13
▪ trisomy 16 (full)
▪ trisomy 18
▪ trisomy 22
▪ A profound and irremediable congenital or chromosomal anomaly existing in the unborn child that is incompatible with sustaining life after birth in reasonable medical judgment as certified by two physicians that are licensed to practice in the State of Louisiana.
Exemptions are not going to solve the larger problem, of course. All levels of family planning should be between women and their doctors.
“Pregnancy is a very complex medical condition and there are no two pregnancies that are the same,” said Jackie McGranahan, policy strategist with the ACLU. “No matter how detailed you get, there are always going to be case-specific situations that won’t be covered. These are medical decisions that should be decided by doctors, not lawyers, not lawmakers.”
In the mad dash to erase reproductive rights in this country in the wake of the Dobbs decision, women have been not so subtly told that their lives matter less than the babies they carry. The Kentucky Supreme Court will decide the future of abortion in this state, and we can hope that they will recognize a right to privacy and therefore bodily autonomy. If not, then the justices and everyone else involved needs to recognize that every pregnancy is different, every woman is different and that our laws need to recognize both those points. As we can see from the brave accounts of women like Amy English and Leah Martin, to do otherwise is inhumane.
This story was originally published February 9, 2023 at 1:01 PM.
