ProPublica can’t see malpractice, only abortion bans
[This article is a transcript of “ProPublica can’t see malpractice, only abortion bans,” courtesy of volunteer Ben Tomlin. If you’re interested in volunteering to transcribe more of our content, please complete our volunteer survey.]
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Okay, ProPublica makes another attempt, “A Pregnant Teenager Died After Trying to Get Care in Three Visits to Texas Emergency Rooms.”
This is the story of Naveah Crain: she didn’t get the care she should have gotten at all, and she died. I will explain it in a second, but this story is a very obvious case of medical malpractice. ProPublica and outlets like it will scour medical records in states that have abortion bans, looking for malpractice obstetrics cases, and then try to make them about abortion bans.
It’s important to remember that medical malpractice happens in all states: it happens in states with abortion restrictions, it happens in states with no abortion restrictions, but they only want to look at the cases in states with abortion bans and then try to frame it this way.
That narrative, that abortion bans make doctors afraid to give appropriate care, really makes no sense in this story. The first hospital she went to diagnosed her with strep throat. They didn’t even investigate her symptoms. They didn’t seem to be worried about abortion bans or her pregnancy at all. Far more absurd, the second hospital, she screened positive for sepsis and then they told her she was fine to leave. What is that?
Please note, there’s nothing in this article to suggest that they secretly didn’t think she was fine to leave, they were just afraid to treat her because of abortion bans.
On the contrary, it looks like they were just idiots. She had gone to this second emergency room, and they had noted that she had a fever and a high pulse and other problems. They gave her IV fluids, they gave her antibiotics, they gave her Tylenol, and her fever didn’t go down, and her pulse remained high. And yet, OBGYN William Hawkins discharged her.
Hawkins had missed infections before. Eight years earlier, the Texas Medical Board found that he had failed to diagnose appendicitis in one patient and syphilis in another. In the latter case, the board noted that his error ‘may have contributed to the fetal demise of one of her twins.’ The board issued an order to have Hawkins’ medical practice monitored.
A Pregnant Teenager Died After Trying to Get Care in Three Visits to Texas Emergency Rooms, ProPublica
Do you think Hawkins missed diagnosing appendicitis and syphilis eight years prior because of Texas’ abortion ban?
More important question: Do you think the pretty obvious evidence in this story that this was straight medical malpractice will stop ProPublica from trying really hard to frame this as if Crain is a victim of the Texas abortion ban?
No, it won’t.
There are millions of women who have not received adequate healthcare for gynecological issues, for pregnancy related issues even when they carried the pregnancy to term, all sorts of things, but to hear ProPublica tell it, the only reason anyone would be experiencing medical malpractice related to obstetrics is because of an abortion ban. They say right here: “This is what pregnant women are now facing in states with strict abortion bans.” Not states without them? What’s the maternal mortality rate in pro-choice states? Is it zero? There are people in the comments on these stories and on our own content all the time talking about how they live in states that have little or no abortion restrictions, and they still struggle to get appropriate reproductive-related medical care.
[Read more – Are doctors afraid to manage miscarriages because of abortion bans?]
Here, ProPublica quotes whichever expert they picked to say, “pregnant women have become essentially untouchable.” There’s no math to that at all. There’s somewhere between 350,000 and 400,000 pregnancies in Texas every year.
Post-video edit: The above stat is an error. It’s actually between 350,000 and 400,000 live births in Texas every year. Since some pregnancies don’t end in live birth (miscarriage, stillbirth, or abortion), live births represent only a proportion of total pregnancies. The number of pregnancies in Texas each year will be higher than 350,000 – 400,000, but unclear how high. That means the number of annual threatened miscarriages each year will be higher than what I calculated below. I leave the following calculation unchanged as a conservative estimate.
Let’s call it the midpoint: 375,000. About 25% of pregnancies are threatened miscarriages. About half of those actually result in miscarriage, so we’ll call that 12.5%. So what’s 12.5% of 375,000? Because that would be about how many times a year, back of the envelope, rough calculation, about how many times in Texas women have threatened miscarriages that end up being miscarriages. The math there is 46,875.
Let me repeat that: over 46,000 times every year in Texas there are women who have threatened miscarriages where they end up miscarrying. If pregnant women were essentially untouchable, you would be hearing never-ending stories of women unable to get the care that they need because the providers are saying they’re afraid of the law. The reality is that thousands of times a year, tens of thousands of times a year, Texas healthcare providers are helping women manage their miscarriages and their medical emergencies related to pregnancy appropriately.
In fact, it’s telling that ProPublica and outlets like it very clearly want to find stories of women dying because doctors are afraid to intervene. This is what they come up with: a situation where a woman goes to an ER that doesn’t even check to see why a pregnant woman is having abdominal pain and then goes to a second ER where the OBGYN has a history so poor that his practice was monitored because he missed diagnoses before, and he sees that she has signs of sepsis, and he says she’s fine and releases her anyway. That’s the story they come up with to try to say that abortion bans are causing problems.
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