Washington Post - While the more than two dozen abortion bans enacted since the fall of Roe v. Wade all include some kind of exception for the mother’s life, the laws use ambiguous language, with many permitting abortions in a “medical emergency” without offering a concrete definition of that term. Prompted by numerous prominent cases in which women became critically ill after being turned away from hospitals, the issue has spawned debate in state legislatures, several high-profile lawsuits and a standoff with Biden administration officials who say the procedure should be covered by emergency care laws. But behind that public controversy is a little-known struggle between doctors making life-or-death decisions at great personal risk and hospital administrators navigating untested legal terrain, political pressure from antiabortion lawmakers, and fears of lost funding, a Washington Post investigation found. In staff meetings, phone calls and tense, months-long email exchanges, many doctors have repeatedly sought guidance on how to interpret the medical exceptions in their states’ abortion bans, only to be given directives from hospital officials that are as vague as the laws themselves.
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