HERE COMES ⚢ ABORTION ANNIE!

⁣https://www.kcur.org/news/2024....-06-05/after-missour

Just the very end:

Attempts to further limit training in abortion

During a House hearing earlier this year, state Rep. Emily Weber, a Democrat from Kansas City, said she’s heard about doctors first consulting attorneys before helping women in need of emergency abortions.

Under the state’s “trigger law,” health care providers who perform abortions not necessary to save the woman’s life can be charged with a class B felony, which means up to 15 years in prison. Their medical license can also be suspended or revoked as a result.

The only exception is in cases of medical emergencies when a pregnant person’s life is at risk or when “a delay will create a serious risk of substantial and irreversible physical impairment of a major bodily function.”

“We’re losing physicians and doctors,” Weber said. “They’re leaving the state of Missouri because they can’t perform their actual duties that they had extensive education on and got their degree in.”

House Minority Leader Crystal Quade pointed to some bills filed this year that didn’t pass, but that put Missouri on the national stage for “extremism,” likely to impact physicians’ decisions on whether or not to move to the state or out of it.

This included a bill from state Rep. Justin Sparks, a Republican from Wildwood, that would have prohibited public and private medical schools from providing any “abortion-specific training,” including through out-of-state partnerships; and a bill filed by state Sen. Mike Moon, a Republican from Ash Grove, proposed to charge those who perform or get an abortion with murder.

“It’s a perfect storm situation where we are continuing to lose access to care, particularly for maternal care,” said Quade, who is seeking the Democratic nomination for governor.

Quade has spoken with women who said they were sent home during a miscarriage because their life wasn’t yet in enough danger to get an abortion, and she’s spoken with providers who were unsure whether to stay in Missouri, weighing a moral dilemma between their duty to their patients and their fears of legal prosecution if they perform an abortion the state deems unnecessary.

She, too, fears this decrease in interest in Missouri as a place for providers not just to learn, but to establish roots, will only continue.

“What that means is not only potential shortages,” Quade said. “But also that we’re not getting the best of the best anymore.”

Sparks said his legislation wasn’t meant to target OB-GYNs, but rather was written based on conversations with Missouri physicians. He hoped to instead end “abortion fellowships” where doctors are sent across state lines to perform abortions.

Those conversations, he said, included doctors at Washington University in St. Louis who said their students went out of state in order to “become really good at abortions, and then come back to Missouri to perform them in the cases where they’re legal.”

Sparks said this argument doesn’t hold water for him, since universities already teach a standard of care for emergency abortions that he finds to be sufficient.

“To say that we just have to do abortions in order to maintain that level of care is disingenuous,” he said, adding that physicians going out of state for training contributes to “a generation of folks who won’t exist.”

He thinks it’s a stretch to correlate the decrease in OB-GYN applicants with abortion bans, but added that Missouri would not be an appealing state for physicians wanting to go into the “abortion industry.”

This story was originally published in the Missouri Independent.

Source: https://matrix.org/_matrix/med....ia/r0/download/matri

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