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-...
> Texas’s abortion ban threatens prison time for interventions that end a fetal heartbeat, whether the pregnancy is wanted or not. It includes exceptions for life-threatening conditions …
And from the actual text of the law (https://www.capitol.state.tx.us/tlodocs/87R/billtext/pdf/HB0...), abortion is permitted when ‘in the exercise of reasonable medical judgment, the pregnant female on whom the abortion is performed, induced, or attempted has a life-threatening physical condition aggravated by, caused by, or arising from a pregnancy that places the female at risk of death or poses a serious risk of substantial impairment of a major bodily function unless the abortion is performed or induced.’ That is a very broad exception.
The law has to allow for more uncertainty for the carve-out to be effective.
For example doctors have to wait for sepsis to actually occur before treatment, thus some will die because they loose to the infection