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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 16, 2024

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Instead, a clinic employee offered Thurman a two-pill abortion regimen approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, mifepristone and misoprostol. Her pregnancy was well within the standard of care for that treatment.

D&C

No abortion is authorized or shall be performed if an unborn child has been determined in accordance with Code Section 31-9B-2 to have a detectable human heartbeat except when

I am in agreement with you that there would have been no violation of the law as you have quoted, and that the hospital's behavior here sounds egregiously negligent. Under what circumstances is it permissible to wait 5 hours to treat acute sepsis? D&C is usually indicated when a fetus has no heartbeat, and the combination of mifepristone and misoprostol will stop the fetus's heart (mifepristone=shed uterine lining, killing the fetus, misoprostol=induce contractions to push the dead fetus out). So when she showed up at a clinic in Georgia, performing a D&C would have been within the letter of the law.

To steelman the opposing side, perhaps there is another exemption in the law for "care which aids and abets an illegal abortion," or the clinic was critically slow in offering treatment because there was no technician available to check for fetal heartbeats (ultrasound), and this nuance was lost on the journalist.

Anyway, after hearing about the sepsis the lesson is to never visit Georgia, and if you do, never go to Piedmont Henry Hospital in Stockbridge. Never know if doctors there will wait three hours to treat your heart attack because your wife is pregnant.

To steelman the opposing side, perhaps there is another exemption in the law for "care which aids and abets an illegal abortion,"

Don't steelman this. Let someone point to it, or check the law yourself. Otherwise you're simply failing to let yourself come to an accurate conclusion.

Fair point. That text is not in the law. Removing.