SC doctors are looking for conscience protection to provide abortion care in the new federal case – Michigan advance

About three months after the conception of their second child last fall, the couple of the young South Carolina received a forecast for the destruction of the Earth. And two gloomy choices.

Based on numerous genetic tests and ultrasound, which shows that the baby does not grow normally, a specialist in medicine in medicine suspects triplia, a deadly genetic disorder, in which the chromosomes are tripled rather than doubled. The couple could wait for their daughter to die in the uterus or within minutes or hours after birth. Or could end.

But because of an emergency law in South Carolina – which prohibits the termination of pregnancy, if the heart activity is detected on ultrasound – the couple now has to prove that their baby’s condition is fatal to qualify for abortion under the limited exceptions of the state. The mother, who asked to refuse her name to protect her family’s privacy, said the heart activity was still being heard, but the pregnancy is so underdeveloped, the medical team cannot extract a sample from the placenta. And when they began to discuss whether to remove their uterus, the mother said that she and her husband had decided to leave the country. Their doctor associates them with a hospital in Virginia, where abortion is legal.

“I feel discouraged from trying to do it again,” said the mother, who told the Newsroom countries that she and her husband want an abortion so she can start to grieve her lost child and guarantee her own health. “I love being a mother. I want children. I have a beautiful child. But if something like this ever happened to me again, it will not be better, but it may be much worse in this new political climate. “

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For some OB-Gyns in South Carolina, the denial of pregnancy care has become a devastating new part of their work. In the first of its kind, a group of Ob-Gyns as a national consequences asks the Federal Court to overturn the ban on the country’s abortions on the basis that it does not allow “doctors from providing care of abortions assigned by their religious beliefs. “

“Most people go into medicine to provide care and feel very strong about it, especially in the field that they have experience. But as human beings, we also have conscience and religious beliefs that maintain and nourish what we do in our professional field, “says Dr. Natalie Down Bingham, Ob-Gyn, who practices in Colombia and who serves as an elder at the first The Presbyterian Church in Spartanburg.

She is the leading plaintiff among five doctors who claim that the exceptions to the abortion Act violate the clause for the proper process of the first amendment to be too unclear and to violate the free exercise clause. Adopted in 2023, the so -called Fetal Pulse Law of the State effectively prohibits abortions about six weeks of pregnancy before many women first learn that they are pregnant. . llnesses and If the Pregnant Person is in Danger of death or “irreversible physical impairment.”

Bingham, who has been practicing in the country since 2005, said the diagnosis of cancer or severe hypertension would qualify as a medical emergency. She said the state had turned what they had previously been medical issues into legitimate, the possible consequences of which include a loss of medical license, a fine of $ 10,000 and two years in prison.

In order to comply with the law, doctors must report abortions provided under exceptions and maintain related records for seven years, and they must provide detailed medical records that support the diagnosis of a fatal fetal anomaly. According to the court case, some of the hospitals in which the plaintiffs work require consensus from many doctors, and many worry that their decision may be later second by prosecutors or members of the Medical Council.

“How can you say that you can access these exceptions based on reasonable medical judgment when you no longer follow the medical judgment of the people who make these decisions?” Works with high -risk patients. “Down the line, at any moment, some arbitrary prosecutor could question what has no medical training.”

In cases of rape or incest abortion are legal up to 12 weeks of pregnancy. The law requires a doctor to tell the patient that a police report should be submitted within 24 hours after abortion. “In a rare case in which he survived from rape was ready to report the rape to the law enforcement agencies, the police insisted on coming to his home to complete the report,” the complaint said. “The attempt was so humiliating that the patient permanently left South Carolina.”

The lawsuit also notes that the 12-week limit further excludes rape and survivors of incest from access to abortion in these exceptions, as many survivors are children or teenagers and often do not find that they are pregnant until later. From the date of entry into force of the law in August 2023 to December 2023, less than five abortions were provided with exception for rape or incest, according to state health data.

Bingham said that the only pediatric and adolescent Ob-Gyn moved to Virginia on legal matters.

Emerging strategy

During his recent hearing before the Committee on Finance, Health and Human Services, the nominee for the US Senal Robert F. Kennedy Jr. agreed when asked by US Senator James Lankford, R-Quick, if he supported the defense of the defense of the defense of the defense The conscience for healthcare professionals against abortion, healthcare professionals.

“Forcing someone to participate in a medical procedure as a supplier, which they think is the murder, it makes no sense to me,” Kennedy replied.

Despite the effects on the contrary, there are several federal laws that allow suppliers to abandon abortions, including Weldon’s amendment, named after Dave Weldon, President Donald Trump’s nominees to lead US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In recent years, abortion groups have successfully used the laws of religious freedom as arguments against the need to provide or refer to contraception. In 2014, the US Supreme Court ruled on Burwell against Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., that the mandate for covering the birth control in the Act on Accessible Care Act violates the religious rights of corporate owners with profit. In 2020, the little sisters of the poor saints Peter and Paul Home against the Pennsylvania decision, the Supreme Court confirmed the provisions of the Trump administration, allowing employers with religious or moral objections to refuse to provide contraceptive coverage to employees.

Submitted last month, Bingham against Wilson was one of the first federal cases to deal with the religious and conscientious rights of doctors in terms of abortion right.

At an Ob-Gyns conference about 18 months ago, Bingham said she and other doctors began discussing their legal capabilities.

“If we have the right to refuse care, it certainly seems to have a consequence where we have the right to provide care, especially on the basis of our conscience, and then the tenants of each of our own religions and on the basis of years of study and dedication “, Bingham said, noting that South Carolina has a law of conscience that allows healthcare suppliers to refuse care.

Its neighbors include a complex family planning specialist and a member of the Lutheran Church of the Lutheran Church Dr. Patricia Seal, a complex family planning specialist Dr. Jessica Tarleton from the Christian and Jewish Faith, Ob-Gyn Dr. Katie Wynt and an anonymous specialist in Family planning known as Jane Doe. They are presented by the legal project and Bill Kopriv’s Bar Offer.

“For these five doctors, almost every day, they set aside their deepest beliefs,” says Rupali Sharma, founder and senior lawyer in the lawyer project. “Their faith commands them to put others in front of them, and so when they do not provide care for abortion to someone who can now suffer long -term exhausting physical or mental consequences, they feel like they are leaving their license, their families, their freedom from their freedom from Deprivation of this patient, and it was also something that these doctors simply cannot observe. “

In the court case, the plaintiffs want the law to be annulled or at least clarified in order to require the law enforcement agencies in order to affect the woman’s doctor in the cases excluded under the law. They claim that the law is discriminated against, allowing some worldly exceptions, but not religious.

“The ban on abortion in South Carolina is neither religiously neutral nor applicable,” the complaint said. “This allows people to end the potential life for a wide variety of worldly goals. These allowances undermine the alleged interest of South Carolina to criminalize the termination of the potential life, as much as the care of abortions, forced by the deeply retained beliefs of the plaintiffs, would do so. “

Sharma said that before the Dobbs 2022 decision, the legal project claims that the Indiana restriction requiring abortion clinics to bury or creates the remains of all abortions and miscarriages, violate the free exercise clause. They successfully blocked the law until 2023, when the order was suspended.

Since then, religious progressives have challenged the ban on abortions in Florida, Indiana and Kentucky, using arguments that their faith forces them to get abortions in certain circumstances. Judicial cases in Florida and Kentucky were fired due to a lack of position, while court disputes continue in Indiana.

An abortion expert Mary Zigler has said that, unlike these state lawsuits, doctors in South Carolina may have a better claim to stand up as they can cite direct harm as they are prohibited from providing care, which their religion would appoint. But she said that as the legal scholarship has grown around the argument of secular exceptions, legal theory has rarely been tested in court. California University’s law professor Davis noted that in the decision of the lobby of the hobby for 2014, the plaintiffs were relieved, although they were not directly careful.

“It was not like an employer at the hobby lobby to give people a birth control. There were many other steps along the way, while in this case doctors claim that they … do not interfere when they feel religiously obliged, “Zigler said.

In some of these cases of religious freedom of abortion, contested countries have questioned the sincere religious beliefs of the plaintiffs.

Sharma says that to doubt the religious and conscientious beliefs of her clients is not to understand their work.

“It’s about when you see suffering and you’re authorized to stop it, stop it, right?” Sharma said. “And the idea that these things would not be central to most religions is somehow striking to me. Of course, abortion and religion are interconnected, since abortions for many people and religion for many people are related to you, and your life matters and your family matters and you can keep these things and protect these things. “