A story just published on CNN (yes, kind of shocking given their shift to the right) reveals that a number of major medical facilities in Texas and even in some blue states are forbidding the physicians in their employ to speak to the media about the ways their patients are being harmed by abortion bans.
In one case, the New York Times reached out to a physician in the northeast who serves on a state maternal mortality board, but the PR department at her hospital forbade her to interview with them. She had hoped to highlight the ways abortion bans are harming women who have to travel from red areas of the country in order to obtain medical care, and described her reaction to the PR department’s attempt to “muzzle” her as both sickening and disgusting. This sentiment was almost precisely mirrored by a physician in another state also interviewed by CNN.
These two doctors, and six others interviewed by CNN, say their employers – major public and private medical centers in five states – have asked them to not speak publicly about abortion, or have instructed them that if they do speak publicly about abortion, they can do so only as private citizens and cannot mention where they work.
The article goes on to describe how doctors in Texas now have to wait until a woman is on death’s door before they can perform man abortion to save her life, and yet many hospitals in the state refuse to allow their doctors to speak out about what is happening in their facilities—one doctor said she was permitted to speak to the media, but she could not do anything that would identify the hospital she works for, such as using her work e-mail.
The entire article is worth a read, even if it does come from CNN.
Perhaps some of these hospitals see their bottom line as being more important than the lives of women—surely they would not want pregnant women to stop giving them their business because they have heard stories that might cause them to rightfully fear for their lives. Or perhaps they are worried that if they tell the public the truth, they will anger the unvaxxed MAGAs in their communities, losing a portion of the market for (mostly) geriatric patients. Women’s safety and well-being takes a back seat to profit, once again.
