What Abortion Bans Do to Doctors

In Idaho and other states, draconian laws are forcing physicians to ignore their training and put patients' lives at risk.

- Sarah Zhang

Kylie Cooper has seen all the ways a pregnancy can go terrifyingly, perilously wrong. She is an obstetrician who manages high-risk patients, also known as a maternal-fetal-medicine specialist, or MFM. The awkward hyphenation highlights the duality of the role. Cooper must care for two patients at once: mother and fetus, mom and baby. On good days, she helps women with complicated pregnancies bring home healthy babies. On bad days, she has to tell families that this will not be possible. Sometimes, they ask her to end the pregnancy; prior to the summer of 2022, she was able to do so.

That summer, Cooper felt a growing sense of dread. Thirteen states-including Idaho, where she practiced-had passed "trigger laws" meant to ban abortion if Roe v. Wade were overturned. When this happened, in June 2022, some of the bans proved so draconian that doctors feared they could be prosecuted for providing medical care once considered standard.

Soon enough, stories began to emerge around the country of women denied abortions, even as their health deteriorated.

In Texas, a woman whose water broke at 18 weeks-far too early for her baby to survive outside the womb-was unable to get an abortion until she became septic.

She spent three days in the ICU, and one of her fallopian tubes permanently closed from scarring. In Tennessee, a woman lost four pints of blood delivering her dead fetus in a hospital's holding area.

In Oklahoma, a bleeding woman with a nonviable pregnancy was turned away from three separate hospitals. One said she could wait in the parking lot until her condition became life-threatening.

Idaho's ban was as strict as they came, and Cooper worried about her high-risk patients who would soon be forced to continue pregnancies that were dangerous, nonviable, or both.