Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit
nop_slide | on: Trump wins presidency for second time
> 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.

This literally happened very recently

https://www.propublica.org/article/nevaeh-crain-death-texas-...

eadmund | parent
From that very article:

> 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.

sn | root | parent | next
The doctors had to be so certain that it was life threatening before acting that once they decided it was life-threatening, she was already going to die no matter what they did. And this is not an isolated incident.

The law has to allow for more uncertainty for the carve-out to be effective.

daedrdev | root | parent
This might blow your mind, but for a condition to truly be life treating some people will probably die even if they have treatment, otherwise by definition it would not be a life threatening condition.

For example doctors have to wait for sepsis to actually occur before treatment, thus some will die because they loose to the infection