I want you to stop typing and just sit in a quiet room and think about what you just wrote for five minutes becasue I know how smart you are.
Doctors already chart and type notes all day long outlying their reasons for medical procedures and for doing what they do. If they don’t, they/their practice/their hospital doesn’t get paid, they lose their license to practice, business can get sued. I mean wtf?
I know all that and acknowledged it in a response you quoted:
All that would be required is for the doctor performing the procedure to provide a legitimate health-basis for the procedure (e.g. "ectopic pregnancy"). Which doctors do pretty routinely for all sorts of things.
I don't care if the decision is up to one doctor. Makes no difference to me if one doctor makes the call. Like I said, if two doctors is unworkable or unnecessarily redundant, get rid of the requirement.
Also what determines if the mothers life is at risk? What risk counts as “at risk”? 10% chance or more that she’ll die? 20%? 80% chance of death before dlew allows it? None of this is uncomplicated, easy or straightforward. You have to know that.
I'm fine with making "life at risk" as broad as necessary. Any abnormal physical complication.
Everyone’s definition of abnormal will be different.. Who decides this ridiculously long list of abnormalities? Doctors? If so what group of them and why? How are they individually selected? If not doctors than who? Senate? Congress? A committee? Who’s on the committee and why? State by state or national group of people? 35 year olds are three times as likely to die as a result of pregnancy as a 20 year old is. Does that count as an abnormality or no? Why?
I'd be fine with leaving the determination of that to the doctor's individual discretion - so long as a doctor can articulate a legitimate physical health related reason that is a departure from an otherwise unremarkable pregnancy. I don't think a 35 year old giving birth is "abnormal" and if something like that needs to be spelled out by statute for physicians, then fine.
If you're uncomfortable with doctors having that amount of agency/responsibility, then sure, get a group of physicians (selected however you think is best) to come up with a physician-endorsed, proper definition of "complication presenting a physical threat to the mother" and codify every single possible scenario.
I'm not married to any proposal. But I do think there are ways for medical ethics and the malpractice law to come up with a reasonable ethical and legal framework that largely provides deference to doctors on the question.
So you don’t personally think a 35 year old giving birth is abnormal. Fine. What about a 52 year old? What about a 10 year old? Those are serious questions so take a minute before you answer them if you want.
What if an individual doctor in Salina does think that a 35 year old trying to have a baby is a worthwhile reason to abort though because that person is three times more likely to die than his patients who are 20? Are your going to be ok with that? Also, What if she is 35 with cancer and diabetes? Does it matter what stage the cancer is in? Does it matter what kind? What if a different doctor thinks that high blood pressure is a reason because they are also more likely to die? Are you personally going to be ok with that or are you going to say oh that’s bullshit and they’re just using her high blood pressure as an excuse. I mean they are doctors giving medical reasons that prove it to be a higher than normal risk for pregnancy. You will be ok with that though. I just gave a couple of examples. There are thousands of individual factors which make a pregnancy more at risk to the mother. Thousands. You want to weigh in on all of them? Does that sound “reasonable”? You think we’ll get the American public or every doctor to agree on all of them?
I also don’t think you can honestly say it should be easy to throw a doctor and a lawyer in a room and come up with every contingency. It isn’t possible. You can’t honestly believe that. First, you aren’t going to get a group of people to agree and if you do then you cherry picked the people based on what you already knew about them. There are also way way way too many individual medical issues/complications/problems to make rules or laws on them all. The flowchart would be almost infinite.
If a doctor has a reasonable, good faith belief that pregnancy presents a significant threat to the life of someone with hypertension or stage four breast cancer, who am I to say whether any of that's true? I'm not a doctor. But this question/issue isn't novel at all. "Necessary to protect the mother's life or health" comes from Roe. The question (or some version of it) already exists throughout state abortion laws -- including in Kansas and California and New York and many other places, and has for a long time. Doctors have been asked and answered the question throughout the country for 50 years.
So your question about the 35 year old with diabetes and/or cancer trying to abort in Salina? If she goes to that doctor, today, and asks for an abortion at 21 weeks, the same "life or health" question gets asked and a good faith determination by the doctor has to be made.
Regardless, I think there are enough cases (read, the vast majority) where the procedure isn't performed for any real physical health risk reason.
