United States – Tennessee state court has been considering a campaign of doctors and women to hinder the authorities from implementing an almost total abortion ban in cases when dangerous pregnancy complications would appear.
Legal Disputes Over Vague Medical Exception
The defense lawyers of seven women who were refused abortions because their own pregnancies were complicated by diseases or conditions and the two doctors testified before a three-judge panel in Nashville, Tennessee, in Nashville’s Twelfth Judicial District Court that the medical exception in the state’s total ban on abortion was so unclear that doctors have to turn away patients trying to get urgent care, as reported by Reuters.
Implications and Pending Supreme Court Decision
“Doctors are denying or delaying abortion care in cases where even defendants concede that it would be legally permissible,” said Linda Goldstein, a lawyer for the plaintiffs at the Center for Reproductive Rights.
Whitney Hermandorfer, a lawyer employed by the office of Republican Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti, states such cases of severe pregnancy complications as “terribly unfortunate.”
However, she said this occurred in a rare situation where such an exception as this one would come up, but the medical exception also gives the doctor authority to perform an abortion in a case where a woman’s death is prevented, or the extent of her damage is not reversible.
Debate Surrounding Ambiguity of Medical Exemption
Still, Presiding Judge Patricia Head Moskal, a member of the three-judge panel, said it was “hard to make it clear” and it had “indefinite terms.” Moreover, Judge Moskal questioned a “substantial” risk, and she was not sure what it was in fact.
Tennessee’s airtight ban came into effect in August 2022, after Earlier in the year, the U.S. Supreme Court- a conservative-leaning Authority made a landmark ruling that overturned its Roe v. Wade precedent that had been in place since 1973 and had made abortion legal nationwide.
GOP-controlled Tennessee is among sixteen states that have approved heavy restrictions, indeed outright bans, on abortion with the few exceptions allowed. The Senate adopted a bill with the medical exemption in August 2019.
However, in September, a coalition of women physicians and women filed a suit to challenge the law, claiming its violation of the Colorado Constitution. This concern was the too narrow and generalized argument, a similar debate in other states such as Texas, Idaho, and Oklahoma on whether these medical emergencies allow exceptions to conservative abortion bans.
On April 24th, 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court will deliberate whether or not the Democratic President Joe Biden’s administration’s argument that a federal law directing medical institutions to offer emergency “stabilizing care” to patients should take priority over Idaho’s nearly absolute abortion ban.
Concerns Over Patient Care
At Thursday’s arguments, Goldstein stated that doctors in Tennessee were reluctant and prescribed the patients to leave the state to get medical care critical because the exception of medical necessity exempted such doctors from prosecution, leaving them with this ambiguity to decide whether to offer the abortion care necessary for the patients to live or undergo medical care required for their survivability, as reported by Reuters.
She mentioned the case of Nicole Blackmon, a poor person who was unable to travel, and after 15 weeks, she realized with high confidence that her fetus was dying; she had to traverse the entire pregnancy and deliver a stillborn child at 31 weeks.