Abortion Bans Mean Women Die

Exceptions to save the "life of the mother" are largely meaningless.

Feminist protesters in Poland, 2020, via WikiMedia.

Another woman is dead in Poland thanks to the country’s “pro-life” abortion ban. Dorota Lalik was five months pregnant when her water broke. She went to John Paul II hospital, a Catholic institution (in case you couldn’t tell by the name), where instead of giving her appropriate medical care, doctors simply told her to lie down with her legs elevated, so she could retain medical fluids. Because surely this is how it works: If a pregnant woman lies down and lifts her legs up, the baby won’t come out.

Good on this Catholic institution, I suppose, for embracing the theory of gravity.

John Paul II hospital does not perform abortions; they abide, it seems, by the broadly-debunked but nevertheless now-ubiquitous anti-abortion theory that abortions are never necessary to save a woman’s life. Someone should tell Dorota Lalik that: She developed sepsis, and within three days, she was dead. She is one of several Polish women who have died because something went wrong with their pregnancies, and they were not offered (or not permitted to have) abortions.

This is the reality of abortion bans, even when they technically have exceptions for the pregnant woman’s life: Criminalizing abortion means that doctors are often too scared to recommend abortion, even where necessary; it means doctors who have far less training on how to even provide abortion care; it means health workers who are paranoid about going to jail and patients who get substandard care. Some pay for it with their lives.

Poland’s strict anti-abortion law is actually more liberal than the laws of many conservative US states. Poland has long outlawed abortion, and tightened the law in 2021 to ban abortions even in cases of severe fetal anomaly, but the procedure is still technically allowed to save a woman’s life or health (health exceptions, in conservative US states, are virtually nonexistent — abortion opponents 100% expect pregnant women to compromise their health, even severely, even permanently). Still, the reality in Poland, a heavily Catholic country with a growing authoritarian bent, is that there are many barriers to break through before a woman with a life-threatening emergency can get a legal abortion in a hospital. Two physicians have to certify that the abortion is life-saving, which obviously takes time and which many won’t do; a chaplain may get to weigh in, or there may simply be a hard-and-fast “no abortions” rule; I imagine there are layers of lawyers and administrators involved; and finally, you need doctors, nurses, and support staff who are willing to carry out a deeply stigmatized procedure that the country’s political and religious leaders have deemed a crime, a profoundly shameful act, and a sin akin to murder — and that those health workers may not have been extensively trained on, because of the Polish abortion ban.

This is not a situation in which you want to be a pregnant woman who has a dying fetus inside of her and is quickly succumbing to a deadly infection.

Polish feminists have long resisted their country’s abortion ban, protesting fervently and working hard to get abortion-inducing medications into the hands of women who need it. At least one of those activists has been criminally prosecuted. Women in Poland are not going quietly into this misogynist hellscape. But the rise of authoritarian, traditional, patriarchal leaders in the country has meant direct attacks on women’s rights and the feminist movements, and receding democratic governance and civil society has closed off many of those activists’ paths to influence.

Abortion opponents worldwide now routinely claim that abortion is never necessary to save a pregnant woman’s life; then they say, ok, we’re going to make abortion a crime, but to appease the public we’ll allow it to save a woman’s life — which again, is never actually necessary. And in the US, the “life” exception isn’t actually an exception — it’s an affirmative defense, which means it’s something a health worker can claim after that health worker is already criminally charged for performing an abortion, and facing years in jail, the loss of their license, and possibly total bankruptcy.

So that’s the strategy here in the US: Abortion is a crime with serious penalties, and the people making and enforcing the law say it is never necessary to save a woman’s life, but they’ll let you argue that an abortion was necessary to save a woman’s life in court, once you’re on trial, in a case where right-wing prosecutors will pull out all the stops to convince a red state jury that you, now an “abortionist,” had plenty of other options.

This is not an “exception.” It is a threat.

The Polish abortion ban is extreme, but marginally less so than abortion bans in several conservative American states. And the Polish ban, in a country with a much smaller population than that of the US, has already claimed several women’s lives.

I have no doubt that women will die in the US because of pregnancy complications that, in pro-choice states, would be managed with safe abortion. I have no doubt that women will die in the US because they took abortion into their own hands, and didn’t have the knowledge or resources to do that safely. Frankly I would be surprised if it hasn’t happened yet, and we just haven’t heard about it (what doctor wants to admit they killed their patient?). In conservative states, feminist activists are working hard to get abortion pills to women in need; many are also working to get whatever exceptions on the books they can. This is for good reason: any exception is marginally better than no exceptions at all. We can hope that some doctors, when faced with a pregnant woman near death, will know the affirmative defense of “I did this to save a woman’s life” is there, and will choose to risk their freedom to keep a patient alive. We can hope that some doctors will be brave.

But many won’t have that option. And just like in Poland, where abortion opponents claim that Lalik’s death has nothing to do with their abortion ban, American abortion opponents will no doubt continue to ignore or deny the death, fear, and despair that they are causing.

So when you hear that abortion bans include exceptions for the “life of the mother,”¹ don’t fall for it. These bans don’t save women’s lives. They end them.

xx Jill

1. *My kingdom for accurate language here, which would be “life of the pregnant woman” or “life of the pregnant person,” but I’m trying to use the most common and recognizable terms. But ugh it drives me nuts that the anti-abortion movement has so thoroughly won the linguistic battle on this.