The following is presented as part of The Columbian’s Opinion content, which offers a point of view in order to provoke thought and debate of civic issues. Opinions represent the viewpoint of the author. Unsigned editorials represent the consensus opinion of The Columbian’s editorial board, which operates independently of the news department.
Try as he might, Donald Trump can’t blur the hard reality he forced upon American women. He vowed in 2016 to get rid of Roe v. Wade and succeeded. As a result, American women lost a half-century right to end an unwanted or dangerous pregnancy.
Some of the harsh truths turn into nightmares. When Nicole Miller, mother of two and 20 weeks pregnant, started to bleed heavily, her husband rushed her to an emergency room in Boise. She needed a life-saving abortion, but the ER staff refused to perform one. Instead, they loaded her onto a plane for Utah, where the doctors could do what she needed to survive. One of the Idaho doctors reportedly told her, “We need to get you to a place where you have all of your options.”
This story isn’t a freakish exception. At least six women in similar situations have been airlifted out of Idaho, a scene you’d expect in an impoverished country with bare-bones health care.
Trump argues that ending Roe simply left rulemaking on abortion to the states. Some conservative states would have restrictive laws, he said. Some would be more relaxed. That pitch was not without its appeal.
Until you looked at the states. Idaho had put such a strict ban on abortion that its doctors wouldn’t do the procedure for fear of losing their licenses and facing jail time if some ignoramus second-guessed their decision to end even a catastrophic pregnancy.
Miller recalls thinking, “I’m standing in front of doctors who know exactly what to do and how to help and they’re refusing to do it.”
After Roe went down, the Biden administration told ER doctors that they must perform emergency abortions when necessary to protect a pregnant woman’s health. The U.S. Supreme Court — Trump’s court — recently declined to decide on whether states had to comply with that federal law. Abortion foes claim that the ER exception was written to turn emergency rooms into “abortion havens.”
There is now a nationwide migration of OB-GYNs from states that ban abortion to states that permit it. Their departures are creating health care deserts for local women. Since its radical ban was put in place, Idaho has lost nearly one-quarter of its doctors in obstetrics and gynecology and more than half its maternal fetal medicine specialists.
Trump tries to cover the damage he’s done to women’s health care with outlandish claims. He recently said: “They will take the life of a child in the eighth month, the ninth month and even after birth.”
Taking the life of a viable newborn is murder and was murder in the days of Roe. Trump doesn’t say — and might not even know — that he was referring to the rare late-term abortions where the fetus has severe deformities and is nonviable.
Trump is trying to appease his anti-abortion constituency while, wink-wink, struggling to make the pro-choice majority think his dismantling of Roe v. Wade isn’t the disaster it’s become.
Trump’s “pro-life supporters” needn’t worry. He has put them in charge. And he probably thinks he can lie his way out of the terrible consequences for women who need to end a pregnancy.
Who ever thought an American bleeding out from a disastrous pregnancy would have to be flown to safety in her own country?
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