Lizzie Presser:
The way the law is written, if you’re a doctor in the state of Texas and a patient comes into the hospital experiencing a miscarriage, those doctors often have to wait until one of two things happens.
Either the fetus no longer has a heartbeat and the doctor can document that, or their patient experiences some life-threatening condition, like sepsis, and then they can intervene. So what you can see in this data is that, if you are a patient who walks into the hospital in Texas and you are experiencing a miscarriage, but your fetus still has a heartbeat, you’re more likely to develop an infection, because your doctor is waiting for you to get extraordinarily sick before they intervene.
And that’s what’s so difficult to wrap your head around in this data. Like, what this shows is a statewide trend that doctors are saying to their patients who come in with miscarriages, whom they know are at a higher risk of developing an infection, they have to say to them, we cannot help you unless you become extremely sick with a complication like sepsis.
