A rural Idaho hospital will stop delivering babies and providing other obstetrical care, in part due to legal fears from the state’s abortion ban. Bonner General Health currently serves the city of Sandpoint, home to roughly 9,000 people, but beginning mid-May, expecting parents will need to drive at least 45 miles to find a suitable hospital.
“We have made every effort to avoid eliminating these services,” Ford Elsaesser, Bonner General Health’s Board president, said in a news release that cited the state’s “political climate.”
Alongside legal fears, the hospital has suffered from low staffing and has already been seeing fewer deliveries, recording just 265 births in 2022. The state has some of the nation’s strictest anti-abortion laws, making it so that doctors can face felony charges and lose their medical license if they perform an abortion—even in the case of a life-saving procedure. “For rural patients in particular, delaying medical care until we can say an abortion is necessary to prevent death is dangerous,” Dr. Amelia Huntsberger, a Sandpoint obstetrician, said last year in a court filing supporting efforts to halt the ban. “Patients will suffer pain, complications, and could die if physicians comply with Idaho law as written.” Huntsberger told the Idaho Capitol Sun she plans to leave the hospital and the state over the law. Read more at Idaho Capitol Sun.
The extremist anti-abortion movement is not consistent with Jewish teaching which is that medically necessary abortions are, in fact, necessary. They are more common than people realize.
It depends on what you call medical necessity . Does medical necessity mean an irresponsible teenager who doesn’t want to raise a child? Or a couple who made a ” mistake” and want to disose of it? Is full term abortion acceptable ANY time? Yes, there is a very small percentage of allowable and necessary abortions which must be performed.
Abortions to save the mother’s life are very rare events! This is fake news reasons to close obstetric care.
Hence, the article mentioned that the _hospital is under-staffed.
So which is better, Roe v Wade, or retarded rules like in Idaho? You obviously can’t trust people to create sensible laws when their passion or religion get in the way, so maybe “letting the States decide” isn’t such a great idea after all…
Literally sickening.