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This should not be terrifically surprising, but for the second year in a row, applications for medical residencies have declined in states with abortion bans.
That’s not just for ob-gyns, mind you. It’s not even just for emergency room doctors. That’s for all medical residencies, period, which have declined an additional 4.2 percent in the last year, compared with a 0.6 percent drop in states where abortion is legal. Ob-gyn residencies alone have decreased in these states by 6.7 percent (and increased by 0.4 percent in states without bans).
This is a very big deal, considering that we have a nationwide doctor shortage and one of the reasons for that is that we do not actually have enough medical residencies for all of our med school grads. We are currently short about 17,396 primary care physicians alone, and that is projected to get much, much worse in coming years.
There’s a certain irony there, in that — writ large — one of the biggest problems facing this country is that Republicans just really do not understand the very basic medical concept of triage. Triage means you deal with the big, serious, life-threatening problems first, like “people will die because we do not have enough doctors and hospitals for everyone,” while they’re standing around doing stupid, babyish shit like banning abortion and ranting about “post-birth abortions” because they are actually somehow too daft to understand what palliative care is, or to grasp that, in an emergency, you don’t actually want doctors standing around going “Oh gee, is she septic enough yet?” before acting.
You don’t get to say you give a damn about “life” when each and every one of your actions/inactions leads to more death.
The United States has the highest maternal mortality rate of all wealthy nations. That fact is disturbing enough in and of itself, though hardly surprising. Even more disturbing, however, is that one of the leading causes of death for pregnant and postpartum women is being murdered by the man who got them pregnant in the first place.
That very sad fact is what inspired researchers at Tulane to look into the effect that abortion bans may or may not have had on this little issue. On Monday, they released a study confirming a link between abortion bans and an increased risk of intimate partner violence.
Via Health Affairs:
Using robust difference-in-differences ecologic modeling, we found that enforcement of each additional Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers (TRAP) law was associated with a 3.4 percent increase in the rate of intimate partner violence–related homicide in this population. We estimated that 24.3 intimate partner violence–related homicides of women and girls ages 10–44 were associated with TRAP laws implemented in the states and years included in this analysis. Assessment of policies that restrict access to abortion should consider their potential harm to reproductive-age women through the risk for violent death.
This is all extra horrific when you consider that four of the states that have abortion bans also bar pregnant women from getting divorced.
Yes, this definitely all seems like the work of people who love life and do not just very much hate women.
Progressive organizations in Florida say they are in dire need of the funds necessary to get the word out and ensure that the abortion rights measure on the ballot this November is passed. The measure has the support of a majority of Floridians, but the threshold to actually get an amendment to the state constitution is 60 percent, which is pretty high. It’s doable, but they’ve got a tough road ahead of them for sure. The ballot measures that passed in other states did so with numbers in the high 50s.
The nice people in the Louisiana House decided this week that child victims of rape and incest who get pregnant should definitely be forced to give birth against their will — clearly in hopes of really driving it home that they have absolutely no agency over their own bodies.
Grab a pillow to scream into before reading this one, from the Louisiana Illuminator:
“That baby [in the womb] is innocent … We have to hang on to that,” said committee member Rep. Dodie Horton, R-Haughton, who voted against the bill.
Rep. Lauren Ventrella, R-Greenwell Spring, also voted against the legislation, saying the proposed law would be difficult to enforce. Teenagers who had consensual sex might feign rape or incest in order to get access to abortion services, she suggested.
Dodie Horton, by the way, is the distinctly awful human being who recently sponsored another bill in the House that we covered — a bill that will force schools to display the Ten Commandments in classrooms. Seems like she might have some real control issues when it comes to children. She wants to force them to practice her religion and she wants to force them to have the babies of the men who raped them. Nice!
At the same time they passed this bullshit, they also voted down three bills meant to protect doctors from criminal prosecution for miscarriage management. So, you know, probably not the place you want to do your medical residency or practice medicine at all.
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