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Comment by kokanator | Hacker News Reader

It is important to note the position was that of the Hospital and not a legal position. All laws in place or being contemplated allow for abortive procedures in medical emergencies such as when the mothers life is in danger.

For instance, the Mississippi law which was the impetus of the recent SCOTUS ruling has the following language:

“[e]xcept in a medical emergency or in the case of a severe fetal abnormality, a person shall not intentionally or knowingly perform . . . or induce an abortion"

There are issues with the ICD10 codes related to D&C procedures as they reference or include the word 'abortion'. This should be resolved by the AMA.

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> All laws in place or being contemplated allow for abortive procedures in medical emergencies

SB 612[0] in Oklahoma made abortions a felony, punishable by up to 10 years in prison. I'm not sure how many doctors will feel comfortable making that call.

...Especially considering HB 4327 then empowers citizens to stage witch hunts against those providers. Imagine developing a reputation for performing abortions in that situation.

[0] Which defined a "medical emergency" as "a condition which cannot be remedied by delivery of the child in which an abortion is necessary to preserve the life of a pregnant woman whose life is endangered" – a high bar to clear. https://legiscan.com/OK/text/SB612/id/2564710

Do you mean a stringent bar? A bar that is hard to identify?

Full text of "emergency": “Medical emergency” means a condition which cannot be remedied by delivery of the child in which an abortion is necessary to preserve the life of a pregnant woman whose life is endangered by a physical disorder, physical illness or physical injury including a life-endangering physical condition caused by or arising from the pregnancy itself."

This is very clear a covers all possible situations where the pregnant woman's life would be in danger.

This is very straight forward. If however, you mean to say it restricts abortions too far, you are arguing a different point.

I believe you’re underselling how straightforward this is, and you’ve actually already got it a bit wrong:

> covers all possible situations where the pregnant woman's life would be in danger

The woman’s life being in danger is the second clause. The first is that an abortion is necessary to address it.

It is a mighty task to prove that an abortion was necessary, and empowered citizens can frivolously bring lawsuits.

To me that's the beauty of the United States and the republic that we live in. If Oklahoma has laws and rules that you think are outrageous then move to a different state. On top of even that, if things are just too outrageous here to stand, then move out of the country, like all the media and celebrities that claimed they would move to Canada if and when certain people were elected.

“Just move” seems to imply they made a choice to live there in the first place. Often that isn’t true. What is a 17 year born in Oklahoma to do? Telling them to “just move” when they probably have very little money of their own and probably no family support doesn’t seem very empathetic.

Interesting. No response.

It's a rich mans solution to a problem. "Just move", is clearly something they are easily capable of doing, everyone else? not really. you throw 20 years on a mortgage and then the rug is pulled from under you as the state itself gets worse and worse. You could say the same about refugees, Country's gotten into a bad state? just move. Don't fight for anything, just hope that someone somewhere actually took a gander at the problem and arrived at a solution that is conducive to a prosperous society.

I love that you undid your own point in the second half of the post, and didn't even realize it.

People SAY they want to move to Canada, but it turns out that's not actually that simple.

Moving is a lot harder than folks realize - Internationally especially, but even amongst states.

And it's completely not an option for someone underage.

It’s always so odd to me how people like you suggest the answer to something like Oklahoma’s wildly punitive abortion laws is for folks to just uproot their lives and move to another state immediately. Why don’t the people who hate people having a choice relocate to a less liberal area and simply not have abortions? Nobody is stopping them either, right?

It’s like there’s no consideration for the fact that they have families and communities they are a part of, or that they may lack the means to easily relocate.

When someone foots the bill for these people I’ll stop calling the solution dishonest and hypocritical. Until then, I suggest people who repeat it stop acting like it’s such an obvious, easy solution.

This also ignores the fact that states like Missouri are attempting to criminalize going to other states for them, which means even if you have the means to travel to another state for one without wholesale moving you can’t even do that. Should my home state be able to prosecute me for smoking weed in Colorado?

The day the US feels like two distinct entities with opposing views. Then you’ll have war.

And most of the non-western world will rejoice at the idea of the greatest country on earth forfeiting its hegemony over its inability to control religion when it should have.

Religion is the scourge of the earth, eternally at war against civilisation, education and reason; promoting war and hatred against the « barbarians » wherever it holds some ground.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/may/06/abortion-bans-...

Article discussing this chilling effect.

This is a lot of room for selective enforcement even in the Mississippi law. All it takes are criminal penalties for a doctor to hesitate or even refuse to perform potentially life saving operations. And that’s not even looking at laws like the one in Oklahoma which doesn’t have this carve out. Edit: OK has a stricter form of this carve out for medical emergencies, I misspoke.

OK does have that carve out, see my sibling comment.

This presumes that every hospital in the US knows the laws. Far from the case.

Their lawyers know the laws and they write hospital policies that stop them getting prosecuted and losing their license to operate, so will err on the side of the law, not patients.

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