Of Course They Want Us Dead

Yesterday's ruling is just more proof

A few months before Roe was overturned, I wrote a column about a Missouri Republican who tried to make it illegal to end ectopic pregnancies. The response to the legislation was typical: It was criticized as yet another example of a Republican man being completely ignorant of women’s bodies and pregnancy. After all, ectopic pregnancies aren’t viable, and are life-threatening without treatment. 

The common takeaway was that this Missouri legislator didn’t actually expect women to die as a result of his bill—he was just too stupid to realize that was a possibility. What I wrote at the time is exactly what I think now, in the wake of a court decision that says Texas doctors don’t have to give women life-saving emergency abortions: “Yes, They Want You Dead.” Of course they do. 

Yesterday, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Texas doesn’t have to adhere to the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA), the federal law requiring emergency rooms to give patients life-saving and stabilizing care. Law Dork explains the legal nitty gritty, but the short version is that the judges unanimously ruled that the EMTALA doesn’t require abortions and doesn’t preempt Texas law. 

What’s more, the judges ruled that when emergency room doctors are faced with a patient who has a dangerous or life-threatening pregnancy, they have a responsibility to “stabilize both the pregnant woman and her unborn child.” That means a 6-week embryo would warrant as much emergency treatment as you do.

I flagged this language and argument back in November: it’s the exact case made by Alliance Defending Freedom (the conservative legal group that overturned Roe) in Idaho’s EMTALA case. In fact, the 5th Circuit Court ruling is near-identical to the language that ADF uses in their brief to the Supreme Court. Here’s ADF:

“EMTALA is silent on abortion and actually requires stabilizing for the unborn children of pregnant women.”

And here’s Judge Kurt D. Engelhardt in yesterday’s ruling:

“EMTALA does not provide an unqualified right for the pregnant mother to abort her child especially when EMTALA imposes equal stabilization obligations.”

I don’t need to tell you what it means in reality when doctors are forced to treat a pregnancy with the same care they do an actual patient. We’ve already seen what the Texas law does to women—this ruling takes that indifference towards our lives and enshrines it.

And that’s what I can’t stop thinking about: not the legal jargon, or how this ruling copied and pasted dangerous anti-abortion rhetoric—but that our lives are up for debate at all. I just don’t have it in me to read yet another legal brief calmly discussing my daughter’s right to live another day as if she were a fucking thought experiment.

That’s what conservatives want, after all: for abortion rights to be reduced to court battles and political debates. For Americans to be so distracted with legal and legislative minutiae that women’s lives become theoretical.

How many more ways can they make it clear that they want us dead? And I mean that literally. As I wrote in 2022, it’s not just that Republican lawmakers and the anti-abortion movement see women dying as an unfortunate but acceptable consequence of making abortion illegal. To them, the most noble thing a pregnant woman can do is die so that a fetus can live.

There’s a reason that anti-choice groups have spent the last year and a half valorizing pregnant women who decline cancer treatment or other medical care. In part, they’re spreading these stories because they know maternal death rates are rising in the wake of Roe’s demise—they want to turn horror stories into martyrdom success stories. They need to make our deaths more palatable.

But this goes beyond political strategy: To them, women dying in pregnancy isn’t collateral damage—it’s just our job. If we were good mothers, we’d give up anything for our fetus, including our lives. Those who don’t fulfill that role deserve disdain and punishment. Think back to that 5th Circuit ruling, which said a law meant to protect a person’s life in an emergency situation “does not provide an unqualified right for the pregnant mother to abort her child.”

An unqualified right. In other words: How dare we expect to live.

So you can imagine my exhaustion at the way Republicans have reacted to Kate Cox’s story, and the dozens of other nightmare experiences women have gone public with since Dobbs. These lawmakers pivot again and again, feigning as if this suffering is accidental or unexpected. Pretending as if women’s lives being endangered is the result of post-Roe growing paint, or not having not sufficiently ‘tweaked’ their legislation.

Republicans had 50 years to plan for this moment—of course they knew women would suffer and die. Our deaths were built into their plan in the same way polls and public opinion were. It’s bad enough that they see as disposable; lying about it just adds insult to injury.

Let’s be real. Yesterday’s ruling is part of a much broader plan to normalize women’s deaths, and to get voters used to the idea of divorcing abortion from healthcare. I wrote about this in The New York Times a few months ago—how the anti-abortion movement is redefining legal and medical terms to make it seems as if abortion is never necessary to save someone’s life or protect their health. As Rewire’s Jessica Mason Pieklo pointed out on Twitter, this decision is in service of that goal. The ruling, she writes, “effectively says abortion is always ‘elective’ and never required.”

When you don’t care if women die, that’s almost true.

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