While medication abortion is generally highly effective, it doesn’t always work. Some people require timely follow-up and in-office clinical procedures. Yet the ban would not seem to offer a clear legal path for prompt care of incomplete induced abortions.
People with money could leave Georgia for timely follow-up care, becoming “abortion tourists” in the derisive “pro life” lexicon. Travel for high-quality care, however, would be out of reach for many. In the United States, about 4 in 10 women and girls receiving abortions fall under the federal poverty line. Those unable to travel, like Amber Thurman, would likely need to meet the Georgia ban’s vague emergency care standard to secure treatment. And, as Georgia’s “pro life” lawmakers and activists surely knew, this might be a low standard of care indeed.
In other ban states, patients have had to become severely ill before health professionals, hobbled by fear of prosecution and ambiguous legal restrictions, intervene. Providers have reported many instances where bans have “dangerously warped” clinical care standards. Readily treatable conditions have been left to fester into life-threatening infections, ICU stays and astronomical medical bills. A woman’s life might have to be at immediate risk before doctors intervene when a fetal heartbeat is still detectable, even when the fetus isn’t viable.
With politicians usurping the authority of doctors, is the exodus of obstetricians and gynecologists from ban states any surprise? In Georgia, more OB-GYNs left the state from 2022 through the first half of 2024 (153), than did from 2010 to 2021 combined (107). These departures will make pregnancy less safe for everyone in the state.
By conferring personhood on a fetus, Georgia’s “Living Infants Fairness and Equality Act,” also violates international human rights standards. These standards do not grant a zygote, embryo or fetus rights as people, moves that would undermine a pregnant person’s fundamental rights and agency. Fetal personhood is a religious idea, not a scientific one. Further, agreement on this concept doesn’t exist within or between religions.
In enshrining fetal personhood in legislation, a vocal religious minority in Georgia hijacked the power of government to impose their beliefs on other Americans. These beliefs, which put fetal life on equal footing with the mother’s life, can dangerously undermine care when put into practice. Some of the many pregnancy horror stories of delayed emergency care in the United States echo the longtime charges the ACLU has leveled against Catholic hospitals, which follow U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops guidelines.
Rather than turning to religion, lawmakers might better consider when a pregnant person is no longer a full human being. Right now, in Georgia, the answer is chillingly clear. A Florida man, former speaker of the state’s House of Representatives, got to the heart of the matter when he referred to pregnant women as “host bodies.”
In Kenya, an estimated seven women and girls die every day from unsafe abortion. Thousands more land in hospitals with abortion-related complications. Some of these people likely would have qualified for safe abortions under the health exceptions in the country’s 2010 Constitution. Legal ambiguity, fear of prosecution, and other factors continue to deter providers and patients. These types of factors also reportedly deterred Candi Miller from seeking care in Georgia.
U.S. activists help fund anti-abortion efforts in Kenya. Kenyan “pro life” activists, not surprisingly, oppose critical public health initiatives such as guidance and trainings for health workers on safe abortion. They would rather see women and girls die.
Is this the direction we want to go in Georgia? Will we continue to condemn pregnant people to die and suffer needlessly?
Whether it’s the United States or Kenya, HIV or abortion care, crusaders in love with their own righteousness are the same. They worship power and control above all, no matter the harm they inflict. It’s high time we eliminate these indefensible abortion policies and make women’s health care safe again.
Dara Carr is a global health consultant. She has worked with numerous governments and civil society organizations to improve policies and programs in HIV, family planning and maternal health.
