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Ciara's avatar

I don't know if your article would be the place for this, but I would personally really like to know exactly what health conditions or medical emergencies are involved in situations where the mother's life is at risk(or where her health could be severely at risk), and what procedures pro-choice and pro-life doctors would normally use to treat them. I would honestly really appreciate something like a table listing these out, along side columns containing information about typical treatments for these conditions, which ones could be banned under pro-life laws, which ones would not, how common these cases are etc. Most news articles about these cases that I've read don't go into these details in a very clear way, so I find it hard to understand exactly what's going on, and feel like I just have to decide whose conclusions to trust. I'd like to have more information to be able to decide myself!

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Mary C. Tillotson's avatar

Questions I'd be interested in asking a hospital attorney: Is there any insurance/legal reason for medical sexism in general? It seems like SO MUCH women's health care is a band-aid approach. I watched the first part of the panel (and will finish it later!), and I heard abortion referred to as a band-aid approach, which struck a chord with me because I've had to work really hard to get healthcare for myself that isn't bandaid. These seem to be the bandaid approaches to 99% of problems women present with:

- birth control, if she doesn't want to get pregnant

- clomid, if she does want to get pregnant

- charting, if the doctor is napro

- SSRIs, if she finds her symptoms upsetting

RARELY have I been able to find a healthcare professional who (a) believed what I told them about my symptoms and (b) wanted to figure out if the symptoms were indicative of a problem that should be addressed. I and may other women have spent years suffering from symptoms of undiagnosed (and sometimes severe!) medical problems because boxes were checked and root causes were not explored.

And I'm wondering if the legal thing is part of the reason for this. You're not going to get into legal trouble if you check the right boxes, and these are acceptable boxes to check. If you explore deeper issues, like maybe she has endometriosis or PCOS or a thyroid problem, if you acknowledge the symptoms as *real* and not the product of an anxiety disorder, then you have a much more complex problem to deal with that doesn't fit as neatly into legal checkboxes.

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