Your wife dying because your flight got delayed, and you being imprisoned for trying to save her, are also once in a lifetime events.
There are a small number of women who have died due to their physicians and/or hospitals misinterpreting the law, just as there are patients who die every day due to physicians’ and hospitals’ mistakes. Those are issues which need to be addressed.
But — so far as I know — right now there is nowhere in the country where if a pregnant woman’s life is threatened by her pregnancy then she cannot legally obtain a medical abortion.
Four deaths, reported on by one outlet, in the past couple months:
- A Texas teenager died after going to three emergency rooms and being misdiagnosed and denied treatment: https://www.propublica.org/article/nevaeh-crain-death-texas-...
- Another Texas woman died after a miscarriage as a result of doctors not treating her due to the state's fetal heartbeat law: https://www.propublica.org/article/josseli-barnica-death-mis...
- A Georgia woman with chronic health conditions, which can make pregnancy highly risky but did not exempt her from Georgia's abortion ban, died of complications from a medication abortion: https://www.propublica.org/article/candi-miller-abortion-ban...
- Another Georgia woman died because doctors delayed 20 hours after she arrived at a hospital—9 hours after she was diagnosed with sepsis—before treating her: https://www.propublica.org/article/georgia-abortion-ban-ambe...
This literally happened very recently
https://www.propublica.org/article/nevaeh-crain-death-texas-...
When you are pregnant, and particularly if you are experiencing complications, you do not have time to shop around and convince people and schedule in advance and all that. You are constrained by the spatiotemporal availability of a skilled medical professional.
How many people struggle to afford buying groceries?
Economic hardship results in orders of magnitude more all-cause mortality, making it the more important problem to solve.
Emergency abortions required for health reasons are often needed when things go wrong, and when that is the case it might need to be performed either soon or immediately. Being in a state that opposes it might delay the decision in ways that injure or kill the mother.
Non-emergency abortions required for health reasons - that is, when there is significant risk but it is not unfolding yet - also happen but being in a state that opposes abortions at any level in general might make it difficult - doctors not willing to suggest it to avoid risk to their business, those around you refusing the need and convincing you that it would be bad, not to mention having to plan a medical trip to a foreign location to get it done - and in turn put the mother at risk of injury or death through inaction.
Does it somehow make it less relevant to fix a cause of death because more people die of other unrelated causes?
Far more people die in accidents than any other causes of death in the U.S., seemingly only beat by cancer and heart disease. That doesn’t make every other cause of death any less troubling or worth fixing, and it certainly does not mean that one should hold back existing treatments for “lesser” deaths or injuries.
Any avoidable injury or premature death is one too many.