The medical realities of Florida’s 6-week abortion ban can’t be dismissed | Opinion
A six-week ban on abortion went into effect in Florida on May 1, 2024. Thankfully, a proposed constitutional amendment to protect abortion access will appear before voters on Florida’s November ballot.
Setting aside the preposterousness of what is effectively a blanket ban on abortion, the current six-week ban legislation is rife with omissions and ambiguities, which leaves medical providers at a loss and the health of their patients in grave jeopardy.
There are several such ambiguities within the defined terms of the law. “Fatal fetal abnormality,” for example, is defined as “a terminal condition that, in reasonable medical judgment, regardless of the provision of life-saving medical treatment, is incompatible with life outside the womb and will result in death upon birth or imminently thereafter.”
But how imminent is “imminently thereafter”? There are numerous medical conditions that are incompatible with life but have a survival range of mere seconds to childhood, and it is impossible to predict with any certainty where within that range each case will fall.
Many of these conditions are also impossible to diagnose until an amniocentesis or the anatomy scan of the fetus, which cannot be completed prior to 15 weeks and 18 weeks of gestation, respectively. On the very first day of my Labor and Delivery rotation in medical school, I encountered a patient pregnant with a baby with holoprosencephaly, a congenital defect where the brain fails to develop normally. Most afflicted babies do not survive beyond early infancy.
Our patient was forced to carry to term, endure the hardships and not immaterial risks of labor, and witness her baby die on its second day of life. Would her case qualify as a “fatal fetal abnormality”? Was her baby’s death “imminent” enough for legislators?
An exception to the time limit on terminations is granted to “save the pregnant woman’s life or avert a serious risk of imminent substantial and irreversible physical impairment of a major bodily function of the pregnant woman other than a psychological condition.”
Frustratingly, this carve out does not adequately consider the various potential circumstances. For example, a family member was diagnosed with breast cancer while she was pregnant. She was, thankfully, late enough in her third trimester that her healthcare team was able to induce labor shortly thereafter to deliver a healthy baby, while beginning her cancer treatment as early as possible.
But what about those unfortunate women who receive a cancer diagnosis earlier in pregnancy, but not early enough to terminate within the legal limit? Must they be forced to continue their pregnancies, even though deferring treatment diminishes their likelihood of surviving cancer? Again, the margins of “imminent” are unclear.
The scenarios discussed are but a handful of the numerous ones implicated, drawn mostly from personal exposure. Regardless of one’s moral and religious beliefs, there are medical realities that cannot be dismissed.
What lawmakers fail to understand, or perhaps willfully ignore, is that most later term abortions are driven not by a wanton disregard for human life, but rather by the most tragic and heartbreaking of medical circumstances.
Typically, the law is composed of both legislation and ensuing case law, which addresses the nuances of such legislation in order to resolve ambiguities in the application of the legislation.
But in the case of pregnancy termination in Florida, the stakes are so significant and the penalty so steep, that healthcare providers are naturally unwilling to be the sacrificial lambs required to determine the boundaries of the law, even if they believe in their “reasonable medical judgment” that their actions would be in compliance with the law.
Without case law to fill in the holes, there is an effective stalemate on abortion care in Florida, even within the confines of the written law. The glaring omissions and manifold ambiguities within the legislation belie at best negligence on the part of legislators with respect to their basic civic duties, and at worst a cruel cunning aimed at utilizing uncertainty as a hefty deterrent. Either alternative is unacceptable.
Aryana M. Gharagozloo is an attorney and a fourth-year medical student at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine who plans to pursue a career in obstetrics and gynecology.
