Opinion | The Deeply Personal Price Women Must Pay for Abortion Bans

Opinion

The Deeply Personal Price Women Must Pay for Abortion Bans

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By Mara Gay

Editorial Board Member

In Florida one day this spring, Megan Palmese and her husband put their two small children in the car and raced toward New York, hoping to arrive before her uterus ruptured and she bled to death.

Palmese was undergoing treatment for breast cancer when doctors discovered she was pregnant. She had always wanted a big family but struggled to get pregnant and turned to in vitro fertilization to have her two boys.

But this pregnancy was not viable: The embryo had attached to scar tissue from a previous C-section, a life-threatening ectopic condition known as “cesarean-scar pregnancy” for which abortion is the treatment.

But Florida has a six-week abortion ban and Palmese was six weeks and five days pregnant. Palmese told me in a phone interview her doctor buried his head into his hands. He told her he had reached out to physicians across Florida but none believed they could help, despite the exception in the Florida law for saving the life of the mother. “Everybody said the same thing,” she recalled. “Unless there’s no heartbeat, there’s nothing they can do for me.”

Palmese was shocked. “If my life isn’t important, what is important?” she said. “Who’s going to take care of my kids if something happens to me?”

As Americans vote in the coming days, I hope they’ll remember the ordinariness with which women in this country have been stripped of their rights, including the right to life, in just two years. I hope they’ll remember that medical complications with pregnancies occur regularly in the states that have banned abortion, forcing women like Palmese into life-threatening situations.

In her case, she found the care she needed to save her life in New York, at Northwell’s North Shore University Hospital on Long Island. Dr. Michael Leslie Nimaroff, who treated Palmese, told me it was clear based on medical records shared with him from her doctor at home that Florida had denied Palmese critical care. Dr. Nimaroff seemed to be struggling to come to terms with a political landscape in which doctors are being prevented from saving the lives of their patients.

“My understanding is I don’t understand it,” he told me. “As a health care provider for women, it’s very hard for us to understand not being able to intervene for the mother’s wellness and safety. It goes against what we’re taught.”

Palmese declined to say for whom she plans to vote in the presidential election. But she said she plans to vote for a Florida ballot initiative, known as Amendment 4, that would establish a right to abortion in the state before viability. “Yes on Four is my stance on it,” she said. “We need to keep government out of health care.”

Palmese is just one of an estimated 23 million women of reproductive age living under abortion bans since the fall of Roe v. Wade. Some women have died from the bans, or almost died. Others, like Palmese, have been forced to travel great distances to receive life-saving care.

So long as the bans remain, they are a threat to the dignity and citizenship of every woman in the United States.