NEW ORLEANS (CN) — Even before the overturning of Roe v. Wade, Louisiana's laws governing abortion were already some of the strictest nationwide, but now, with threats of jailtime hanging over the heads of Louisiana's doctors, both patients and medical professionals are at risk, according to a joint report released Tuesday by reproductive rights advocacy groups.
“We were stunned by just how much regular medical practice for pregnant people has been disrupted,” Michele Heisler, the medical director of Physicians for Human Rights, and one of the authors of the report said in a statement.
The report — a collaboration between Physicians for Human Rights, Lift Louisiana, Reproductive Health Impact, and the Center for Reproductive Rights — details how the state’s extreme abortion bans force clinicians to forgo their own best medical judgment, causing delays and denial in prenatal care.
"This anonymized fact-finding and research shows how the bans’ narrow and ill-defined exceptions create confusion, uncertainty, and fear for both pregnant patients and clinicians," they wrote.
These restrictions, they say, place doctors in situations where they must navigate the state’s threat of steep fines, or even jailtime, if they stray from the state’s rigid, anti-abortion doctrines.
Based on extensive research and interviews with healthcare professionals, the groups present a report that shows as doctors fear for their livelihoods if they perform abortions, pregnant people face risky, life-threatening medical treatments and delayed appointments if their physician must worry that a potential miscarriage could appear to be the result of an abortion.
In the report, the organizations call on the Louisiana legislature to decriminalize abortion, repeal the bans and instead ensure reproductive rights across the state. They also encourage medical associations to speak out against the bans and call attention to how abortions ban compromise patient health and go against medical ethics.
In the days after the release of Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, Jeff Landry, then the state's attorney general and its current governor, sent a letter to the Louisiana State Medical Society threatening legal action against any doctor who provided abortion care in the state.
According to clinician testimony included in the report, abortion care providers fear for their jobs and livelihoods if they perform even medically necessary abortions statewide.
The state legislature also increased legal and professional penalties for those providing abortions, including up to 15 years in prison and $200,000 in fines.
The groups say in the report that Louisiana’s abortion bans go against public guidance and run counter to physicians’ obligations to provide proper medical care. The bans additionally violate a range of human rights that protect reproductive health, including the rights to life, health and equality, they added.
The United States has the highest maternal mortality rates in the world and is the only developed country to have maternal mortality rates that are actually climbing each year. Maternal mortality rates typically entail issues that are entirely preventable.
The report authors note that more than a quarter of Louisianans live in a maternity care desert. Within this framework, Louisiana’s maternity rates are among the highest of all states, with 39 deaths per 100,000 births.
Doctors interviewed in the report said women's health and their lives were being risked because of the abortion ban, marginalized people in particular. Research in the study found that maternal death rates are nearly doubled statewide for Black mothers.
Nearly two-thirds of maternal deaths statewide are among low-income women on Medicaid.
Louisiana Right to Life, which helped write the state's ban, did not immediately reply to requests for comment.
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