Will You Vote for 21st Century Medical Care for Yourself & the Women You Love This November?
I just experienced the best medical care our country can offer but I’m not pregnant in a Red state.
I just had the privilege of experiencing the very best of American modern medicine this week. I had to have knee surgery to correct my knee which had lost cartilage on the right side, sliding the knee bones all over to the left side, making it painful to run and eventually even to walk.
Sorry if that is TMI - Too Much Information - for you all but my point is that it was necessary surgery and a pretty major operation - but yet, it’s something that is done thousands of times all across this country by highly trained surgeons and their teams.
It was 21st century medicine and its goal is to get me back to all the running, hiking and dancing I am desperate to do again.
Lots of you, no doubt have had surgeries like this to repair wonky joints or even faltering organs and you are now, fit and living your best lives again today.
We celebrate our American medical system as the best in the world ( if only all of us could afford it ) and clap our American selves on the backs for being the most technologically advanced country in the world, with the top universities, the brightest minds and the most entrepreneurial ingenuity.
So why would we voluntarily decide to deny the 21st medical care that I just received this past week to women in 21 states in our country?
Twenty-one American states now have laws that ban abortion from conception or at various stages up to 12 weeks - Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, North and South Dakota, are just a few of them. Utah allows abortions up to 18 weeks. About 25 million women of reproductive age live in these states.
They now do not have the right to the same top medical care in their states as men do. Are we all OK with that?
When I went to see my surgeon for a followup appointment last Monday for a first knee surgery - an osteotomy - 6 weeks ago - he immediately saw on an X-ray that in 3 weeks since my last appointment , something had gone seriously awry with the healing process.
He feared an infection had possibly set in and he took instant action. “ You aren’t going home, I’m checking you right into the hospital and we’re operating tomorrow morning.”
I was stunned, but that was it. Off, I was whooshed for all the pre-surgery tests and boom, the next am, I was on the operating table for my bones to be readjusted, tests for infection sent off and a new device implanted to hold everything in place.
Then it was days of scrupulous testing, antibiotics, and vitals testing.
BUT here’s the thing that every American, no matter what their gender needs to let sink in:
If I was pregnant and had just run into a serious complication threatening that pregnancy or I was miscarrying and I lived in one of the 21 American states with abortion bans - I would NOT have received 21st Century top of the line medical care.
I would have been sent home by my doctor and been told that there was nothing that could be done, for example, if my water had broken too early to deliver a viable baby yet my fetus still had a heartbeat.
I would have been told like Texan Amanda Zurawski that I instead, had to wait at home and watch for signs that I had developed sepsis, a life threatening bacterial infection that occurs when the pregnant womb opens up too early, allowing bacteria to enter.
Amanda did just that. She went home and waited in agony for 3 days knowing that her much-longed for baby could never survive a birth at 18 weeks, but Texas doctors could not legally end her pregnancy without facing imprisonment of up to 99 years in jail.
She was forced by the uncompromising Texas law to wait until she was at risk of dying, before doctors could end her pregnancy and work to save her life.
After 3 days, Amanda’s temperature soared and she became incoherent. Her husband, Josh, rushed her to the ER, where she almost died twice during the next three days. She survived but her uterus and fallopian tubes didn’t. They were so scarred from sepsis that she can never carry a pregnancy again.
That’s the exact opposite of the treatment I received in New York state as a non pregnant woman. My doctor was desperate to avoid the risk of sepsis. Wouldn’t dream of sending me home to wait for it to invade my body before he could treat my knee.
Likewise if I had gone to the hospital in the throes of an obvious miscarriage in an abortion ban state. I wouldn’t have immediately been offered the safest option to preserve my life and prevent infection - a D & C procedure, which would have evacuated the tissue including the non viable fetus in my uterus.
A simple D & C procedure is what used to be provided regularly for women who were experiencing difficult miscarriages, whether they lived in “Red” or “Blue” states in this country.
It prevented infection of the uterus, allowing women to safely get pregnant again in a few months.
But that’s not what happens now if a woman lives in one of the 21 abortion ban states where pregnant women now live as if they were in the 1800s medically.
You may not have heard the real stories of women in Louisiana, Florida and Texas, who have been miscarrying and refused care by hospitals in their states. Doctors and nurses are too terrified to intervene and end the agony and health risks of their miscarriages, for fear of being accused of illegally ending a pregnancy.
Instead those unfortunate women in the throes of cramping and bleeding have been told to go home or wait in their cars in parking lots until they are in danger of bleeding to death. Only then, can the staff in hospitals legally be allowed to offer them treatment.
Anya Cook lost almost half her blood and nearly died miscarrying her 16 week baby after being denied care in Coral Gables, Florida.
A pregnant medical doctor in Texas was recently turned away from two medical centers and a hospital in Texas with inadequate treatment for her “incomplete” miscarriage. Only when she fell unconscious on her bathroom floor three days later and was raced to the hospital by her distraught husband, could she get “normal” emergency care.
She nearly bled to death in the midst of all kinds of 21st Century medical facilities and highly trained doctors, too afraid of the Republican legislators in their states, who passed these ideological abortion bans, with no concern for the health and lives or their female citizens.
When I was in the hospital being attended by the highly professional doctors and nurses, who made sure that I would not be harmed on their watch, they shook their heads and expressed horror about abortion bans when I brought up the subject.
Every one of the medical staff that I asked expressed disbelief and unhappiness that right wing politics and ideology could prevent medical professionals from applying all their training and best practices to care for almost half the women in this country.
They were aware of the stakes - that while, it’s 21 states today, it could be the rest of the country after November’s election if Donald Trump is elected.
They were clearly deeply worried about it.
Does it mean that all doctors, nurses and physician’s assistants will show up at the ballot box in November and vote for the lives and health of their patients? I don’t know.
But I do ask you to think about the contrast between the care I received - the best of what the American medical system has to offer - and what is being denied to our fellow female citizens in 21 states currently.
Do you want that for yourselves? Your wives? Your daughters? Your sisters? Your grand daughters?
Do you ‘hate immigrants’ and fear them at our border more than you love the women in your family? Do you love a potential tax cut more than your daughters?
Yesterday, my husband helped me to the nail salon , where I was desperate to receive a manicure and pedicure, having escaped the hospital the night before.
As I relaxed in my chair, I watched a young mother come in with her daughter, probably about 5 years old, all dolled up in a dress with her hair in a ribbon, to get a first manicure.
Everyone in the salon oohed and awed and she picked out a color and sat down, enjoying the attention of all the ladies in the room.
But the question is: will moms and dads of all the little and big girls in America, do what’s really important for their daughters in November.
It’s easy to treat your daughter to a manicure, but will you ensure that she gets 21st Century medical care when she grows up and gets pregnant?
That decision is on your ballot this November : Joe Biden and modern reproductive healthcare for the women you love or Donald Trump and his edict - waiting until they are near death before modern medicine can still hopefully save them?
Absolutely Beryl. Trump will end abortion nationwide in some way & then every single pregnant woman’s life & fertility will be at risk. Pregnancy is dangerous without modern medical care. But think of the precedent that will be established- that legally it’s OK to deny medical care to a certain class of people. States are already denying trans people care. Trump will deny immigrants medical care . Then who’s next? His political opponents? Every person in this country will be at risk with a system that denies modern medical group to some groups. While other groups still get it. We have to vote for everyone ‘s right to 21st Century care no matter whether they are pregnant or not.
Thank you Lynda!