While I was looking for more source documents on the September 3, 1972 abortion death of Kathryn Morse, I encountered nothing about Kathryn's death, but I did come across shameless, dangerous pro-abortion propaganda.
I will assume that the woman, named Christina, was telling the truth when she poke to NPR. She lived in Washington, DC and had been happily pregnant until her doctor informed her that the baby no longer had a heartbeat. He offered her the options that are legal in all 50 states: using medication to cause contractions so she would expel her dead baby sooner, performing a procedure to remove the dead baby, or letting her body complete the miscarriage naturally.
None of those three options is an abortion. They are all routine obstetric care. There is not a law on the books that bans any of those three options.
Christina traveled to Ohio for a wedding and began to hemorrhage. She reports that when she went to University Hospitals TriPoint Medical Center in Painesville, Ohio. They performed an ultrasound and confirmed that there was no fetal heartbeat.
Nobody, Christina said, actually provided her with any care, not even pain medication or IV fluids. Christina said that she was bleeding so badly that she was using adult diapers to sop up the flow. She said that they did a blood test and that her hemoglobin wasn't low enough to cause concern.
The blood loss Christina was describing would have been cause for serious concern. So something is already very much amiss. What Christina describes next is appalling. She said that hospital staff told her that they couldn't do anything to treat her until a second hormone test done two days later could confirm the miscarriage.
Christina's husband described the hospital staff as "hesitant" when explaining why they weren't going to treat her. NPR states:
The two of them wondered at the ER if that was because of Ohio's new six-week abortion ban. "I wish someone had come out and said, 'Hey, this is a state law, this is what we're afraid of,' and was a little more frank," he says. Instead he says, paraphrasing what he heard: "It was, 'Well, we don't know if this [pregnancy] is viable, this could still be viable. This is the information you got in D.C., but we need to confirm it."
The narrative NPR is putting forward is that the Ohio heartbeat bill forbade doctors to treat a miscarriage until after doing serial HCG tests to prove that the fetus is dead. But this isn't true. The bill forbids doing an elective abortion if there is a detectible fetal heartbeat. There had been none. There was nothing in the heartbeat bill to forbid a D&C if there is no heartbeat. Removing a dead fetus is not an abortion according to Ohio law. It's spelled out in black and white.
But even if there had been a heartbeat, the Ohio law still would not have blocked the doctors from providing appropriate care. The law specifically states: ""Medical necessity" means a medical condition of a pregnant woman that, in the reasonable judgment of the physician who is attending the woman, so complicates the pregnancy that it necessitates the immediate performance or inducement of an abortion."
There is a lot of ugly stuff going on here. If what Christina says is accurate and not misremembering because she was so traumatized, the hospital is guilty of needlessly risking her life. At the very least, they had a responsibility to know what the law was.
Towards the end of the article, well past where most people will read, NPR does state, "Ohio's abortion restriction doesn't explicitly restrict the treatment of miscarriages or emergency care," but they immediately negate the truth by asserting, "but it can have that effect anyway."
It can only have that effect if doctor are choosing to refuse care for political reasons, to sacrifice their patients' safety and lives in order to have stories to tell that will frighten the public. It's utterly inexcusable.
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