Consequences
Interesting. It seems that anti-abortion states have crap healthcare for pregnant women. Keep your damn baby but you’re on your own, bitch.
The chances that a woman can see a doctor while pregnant — or during a time when she might become pregnant — have fallen significantly since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, according to a new report released Thursday.
The findings, from The Commonwealth Fund, a nonpartisan health care research foundation, show that women living in states with a history of health disparities — often in the Southeast — are affected the most. They are not only less likely to be able to afford a doctor’s appointment; they’re less likely to be able to find an OB/GYN in their area.
That “often in the Southeast” is interesting. The Southeast=the former slave states. The South (as it’s more usually called) is notoriously impoverished, illiberal, and reactionary. It’s almost as if there’s a connection.
The report looked at more than a dozen measures of women’s health care, including maternal mortality, preterm birth and postpartum depression, in all 50 states in 2022, the year of the Dobbs ruling.
That single action “significantly altered both access to reproductive health care services and how providers are able to treat pregnancy complications in the 21 states that ban or restrict abortion access,” the authors wrote.
States with the most restrictive abortion policies, including Mississippi, Oklahoma, Texas and West Virginia, scored lowest in the new report. States that protected abortion care, including Connecticut, Massachusetts and New Jersey, ranked highest.
Women must be forced to keep pregnancies they don’t want, but as for helping them have healthy pregnancies, well shoot, that would be socialism.
— George Carlin
Carlin: “They will do anything for the unborn.”
It is unfortunately the case that they won’t do anything for the unborn except prevent pregnancies from being terminated. And it’s getting worse. Labor and delivery units are closing. Entire hospitals are closing. Efforts to improve the situation (including by expanding Medicaid) fail regularly in the legislature. Alabama has the worst maternal health care quality in the country, and six of the ten worst are in the South.
Right, Carlin was giving them too much credit!
This news item seems relevant to the topic here.
NBC News/AP: Alabama birthing units are closing to save money and get funding
I knew that Alabama was closing a lot of obstetrics wards in addition to closing hospitals. I did not know that one of the perverse incentives to close the obstetrics units is a federal funding category of “rural emergency hospital”, which applies to hospitals that have fewer than 50 beds, 24/7 emergency care, and, importantly, no inpatient services, including obstetrics. So some of these hospitals are hoping to save themselves by making their operations qualify for this funding category.
The closed obstetrics units and closed hospitals means that a large portion of the southern part of the state will not have close access to hospital birthing facilities.
Good grief. What a mess.