Amelia Huntsberger, an OB-GYN, said Idaho's new restrictions are causing turmoil in emergency rooms.At a brewery in this northern Idaho city, hundreds of people recently held a wake of sorts to mourn the closure of Sandpoint’s only labor and delivery ward, collateral damage from the state’s Republican-led effort to criminalize nearly all abortions.
In March, Bonner General Health officials said the law was a driving force in the closure, noting Idaho’s legal and political climate.. “Recruiting replacements will be extraordinarily difficult. In addition, the Idaho Legislature continues to introduce and pass bills that criminalize physicians for medical care nationally recognized as the standard of care.”Amelia Huntsberger, an OB-GYN, has delivered babies and treated miscarriages at Bonner General for more than a decade.
The Idaho Supreme Court has since ruled that the law does not apply to ectopic or molar pregnancies, a rare complication caused by an unusual growth of cells. But physicians say that limited change does not account for many common pregnancy complications that can escalate rapidly.“When is it OK for me to act?” Huntsberger said.
Those conversations proved revelatory. “You get exposed to something, all of a sudden you go, ‘Wow, there’s a different way to look at this,’” he said. “‘What are we going to do about all this?’” As a doctor who cares for complex and high-risk cases, Miller said, she’s had to send patients out of state to end dangerous pregnancies, including a woman with a serious kidney disease.
An exodus could affect broader medical coverage for women who rely on OB-GYNs for routine and urgent gynecological care unrelated to pregnancy, like menstrual disorders, endometriosis, and pelvic pain. “She was trying to figure out if me as the provider was going to report her if she did decide that she wanted to do a procedure to save her life over the life of her fetus,” Villareal recalled. “And the worst part was I could assure her that I’m going to try to do everything that I can for her, but I could not assure her that someone else in the emergency room or someone else in the operating room was not going to report her.
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