Under the new Protect Life Act passed yesterday in the house, if I'd had the wrong doctor at the wrong time, I could have died. But the GOP doesn’t let real life compromise their pandering principles. From Kaili Joy Gray’s diary.
This week, they're focusing on the previously introduced H.R. 358, the cynically and dishonestly named "Protect Life Act," which is really the "Let Women Die" bill. Why? Because the "pro-lifers" in the House want to ensure that hospitals have a right to deny health care to women, even if it means letting them die:
Under H.R. 358, dubbed the "Protect Life Act" and sponsored by Rep. Joe Pitts (R-Pa.), hospitals that don't want to provide abortions could refuse to do so, even for a pregnant woman with a life-threatening complication that requires a doctor terminate her pregnancy. This provision would apply to the more than 600 Catholic hospitals governed by the Catholic Health Association, which are regulated by bishops and prohibited from performing abortions.
They pass their legislation without regard for real life implications. Since I have commented on what happened to me since this happened, I decided to write a diary about it.
The White House has said if this legislation reaches the president he will veto it. Glad to hear it Mr. President. Someone needs to stand up for women.
From the White House:
The Administration strongly opposes H.R. 358 because, as previously stated in the Statement of Administration Policy on H.R. 3, the legislation intrudes on women's reproductive freedom and access to health care and unnecessarily restricts the private insurance choices that women and their families have today.
In the summer of 1979 I became pregnant. My husband turned jaundice and was diagnosed with hepatitis B. (I did not know I was pregnant yet). It is not easy to get HB and we never figured out he got it, other than it might have been a blood transfusion he had two months earlier (HB has a two month incubation period). This was a few years before all blood started being tested because of AIDS. Arthur Ashe, the tennis champion, got HIV from a blood transfusion in 1983 during heart surgery and died in 1993. It was partly because of what happened to him that blood started being tested before transfusions.
I found out I was pregnant, and when I started throwing up thought it was just morning sickness, but it wasn’t. My pregnancy was a body fluid transfer between my husband and I, and the HB got transfered too. I turned jaundice and was very sick for months.
Transmission of hepatitis B virus results from exposure to infectious blood or body fluids such as semen and vaginal fluids, while viral DNA has been detected in the saliva, tears, and urine of chronic carriers with high titer DNA in serum. Perinatal infection is a major route of infection in endemic (mainly developing) countries.[5] Other risk factors for developing HBV infection include working in a health care setting, transfusions, and dialysis, acupuncture, tattooing, extended overseas travel and residence in an institution. [6] [3][7] However, Hepatitis B viruses cannot be spread by casual contact, such as holding hands, sharing eating utensils or drinking glasses, breast-feeding, kissing, hugging, coughing, or sneezing.[8]
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
When I was five months pregnant, I was reading in bed when my water broke and in minutes the bed was entirely soaked in blood. I was having a miscarriage. My husband and I went to the hospital in Sacramento, about an hour away from where we lived. By that time I had already lost a lot of blood. I sat in the orange plastic chair in the waiting room and it immediately filled with blood. The hospital doctors rushed me to surgery and did an emergency D&C. This was a procedure that was used to do abortions, but also had many applications for women's health issues, such as excessive bleeding. I had not lost the baby, I was just bleeding to death.
Because medical and non-invasive methods of abortion now exist, and because D&C requires heavy sedation or general anesthesia and has higher risks of complication, the procedure has been declining as a method of abortion. The World Health Organization recommends D&C as a method of surgical abortion only when manual vacuum aspiration is unavailable.[6] According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, D&C only accounted for 2.4% of abortions in the United States in the year 2002,[7] down from 23.4% in 1972.[8] Most D&Cs are now carried out for miscarriage management and other indications such as diagnosis.
I cried and cried because I knew I had lost my baby. The doctors knew how upset I was, and told me I would have died if they had not done what they did. They also said babies born to HB women can have lots of complications. They recommended I wait until I was well and try again. I got pregnant again five months later and had a healthy, happy girl the next year, who grew up to be a beautiful woman with two wonderful children, a son and daughter.
Some will say my situation is not what the GOP was talking about. But if not my situation than what? I had a life threatening pregnancy that needed to be ended. In what other situation would this act be applied to?
If a doctor, because of religious reasons, had refused to perform the necessary life saving procedure on me, three other people would not be in this world today. Sometimes saving a life, by ending a life, creates other life.
7:43 PM PT: Thank you for the CS. I feel very strongly that without reproductive rights women don't have much choice at all. The choice of when to have children and to be able to support them. The choice to have a career and work, and whether they want to be a parent at all. We all need to be free to make these life changing decisions without political interference.