A six-week Ohio abortion ban has forced people suffering from cancer to travel to Ohio to get abortions that are required to continue life-saving treatment. according to affidavits Submitted by state abortion providers. In at least two cases, cancer patients have been blocked from receiving treatment until their pregnancies were terminated — and getting an abortion required them to leave the state.
The cases underscore how abortion bans — even those with exceptions to save the life of the pregnant person — have upended patients’ lives and limited doctors’ abilities to provide essential medical treatments.
After Roe v. WadeOhio’s June abortion ban was overturned. It also banned abortion at six-weeks of pregnancy. The law was blocked by courts on September 14. The abortion ban includes an exception to protect the life of a pregnant woman. Even though the law doesn’t criminalize pregnant women, medical providers could face a year in jail for providing abortions beyond six weeks and additional fines.
While Ohio’s law is currently blocked, abortion is legal in Ohio for up to 20 weeks. It’s not clear when it will take effect again.
But, the affidavits show, in the two and a half months that the state’s six-week ban was enforced, the law had drastic consequences.
The Ohio affidavits — part of a case challenging the constitutionality of Ohio’s six-week ban — illustrate a much broader phenomenon, said Leilah Zahedi-Spung, a maternal fetal medicine physician in Tennessee, where abortions are banned entirely. Many states have abortion bans. that are enforcing abortion bans,She stated that physicians are facing the same dilemma, and the risk to be jailed is likely to keep them from offering abortions for patients who would require them to start chemotherapy. People in their first trimester are generally not advised to use chemotherapy, as it can cause harm to fetal development and increase the chance of miscarriage.
Since RoeDoctors have confirmed that the language surrounding medical exceptions to abortion bans was unclear and confusing after the ruling was overturned. Many clinicians have reported that they do not feel safe providing an abortion — even if it is the correct and appropriate form of care — until the patient’s condition has progressed to the point where they could die imminently.
“I don’t know anybody that would feel comfortable treating a pregnant patient with cancer because I don’t feel like they’re nearly dead enough,” Zahedi-Spung said. “The threshold that I am holding in order to provide abortion care is basically almost dead to try to avoid being arrested and jailed.”
One Ohio case describes a 25-year old woman with cancer who was already undergoing chemotherapy when she discovered she was pregnant. Sharon Liner, Planned Parenthood Southwest Ohio Medical director, wrote an affidavit. Doctors informed her that she could no longer receive her cancer treatment during pregnancy. She was eight weeks pregnant and could not legally have an abortion in Ohio.
The woman’s doctor, Liner said in the affidavit, did not feel comfortable providing paperwork indicating that she medically qualified for an abortion, like many physicians who are nervous about the hefty criminal penalties possible if one is found to have provided an abortion. To terminate her pregnancy, the woman had to travel outside of her home state. She could only return to continue her delayed chemotherapy.
“The past two months have been horrendous for our patients,” Liner said in the affidavit.
An employee at the Women’s Med Center of Dayton described a similar case. A 37-year-old woman came for an abortion June 27 — three days after the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe. A submitted affidavit from Aeran Trick, clinic operations manager, stated that the patient had stage three melanoma.
The woman could not have an abortion in Ohio as her pregnancy was over six weeks.
“Upon learning that she would need to travel out of state to have her abortion, the patient broke down and cried inconsolably, despite the attempts of multiple staff, including myself, to comfort her,” Trick said in the affidavit.
Ohio abortion providers have challenged the state’s six-week abortion ban in state court, arguing that the state constitution’s privacy protections include a right to an abortion. In agreement, a judge in Hamilton County has blocked the six-week ban while this case goes through the state courts — meaning that abortions are currently available up to 20 weeks pregnancy in Ohio.
Ohio abortion providers also testified that they have heard patients talk about suicide if they were unable to get an abortion. One also said she would consider drinking bleach to end her pregnancy; another asked how much vitamin C she had to ingest to induce an abortion — both practices that would seriously endanger the patients. None of these providers were available to comment.
Research shows that Women are more likely than men to seek medical care after becoming pregnant. This means that patients may not be aware they have cancer until their first visit to the doctor.
These conversations can be emotionally difficult, Zahedi Spung said, especially for patients who were planning to get pregnant but didn’t know about their cancer. If the disease has just begun, some may elect to have it removed surgically. Then they will wait for the pregnancy’s second trimester. They can then begin chemotherapy if necessary, assuming that the cancer has not advanced too much.
Others, especially those with advanced cancer, may need to have an abortion and begin chemotherapy. Then, they can try to get pregnant once they are done with treatment. There are even further complications there since chemotherapy can damage someone’s fertility.
It is even more difficult to tell patients in these cases that they cannot have an abortion in the state.
“It’s awful for patients,” Zahedi-Spung said. “And then you have to say, ‘By the way, the state of Tennessee doesn’t think you’re dying enough, so for you to get the care you need now that you’ve made this tough decision, you have to go to an abortion clinic out of state.”
Patients seeking abortions in Tennessee mainly travel to clinics in North Carolina and South Carolina. The wait lists can sometimes be weeks long. In some states like New Mexico, wait times can take up to six weeks.
There are other consequences to putting off an abortion. It can lead to a more advanced pregnancy, which will be more expensive to terminate. It also delays the time patients can begin cancer treatment, increasing the chance of developing a more advanced form of the disease.
“If you were open to terminating, I would say we need to do that as soon as possible,” Zahedi-Spung said. “You’re fighting with a clock of this cancer that’s growing.”
