Docs pressured me to abort, too. Kansas Republican right to try to criminalize coercion | Opinion

Like Republican Kansas state Rep. Rebecca Schmoe, my first obstetrician tried to push me into aborting when I was pregnant with our twins. So yes, I do see the need for the legislation she has proposed, which would criminalize such coercion.

Maybe you think Schmoe’s experience sounds unbelievable, but I don’t, though the pressure she describes was a lot more dramatic than in my case.

Her Johnson County doctor told her she would die if she went through with the pregnancy. In her telling, he advised her to pick out her casket, admonished her for failing to realize how horrible it would be for her parents to have to bury her, and did not want to let her leave his office until she scheduled an abortion.

If all of those details are accurate, he should have been charged with false imprisonment, which in Kansas is a misdemeanor called criminal restraint, punishable by a year in jail. At a minimum, she should own his house.

And if you take nothing else from this column, please take this: Always, always, always get a second opinion, as Schmoe did. Doctors, like the rest of us, get things wrong sometimes. Obviously, she did not die, and her child is a healthy 21-year-old now.

The D.C. specialist who said I had no choice but to abort was not mistaken in his diagnosis. But even worse than that, he was thinking about his liability rather than about his patient.

I had developed pregnancy-related tachycardia, which is apparently not that uncommon in moms of multiples, who are pumping a lot more blood than in a normal pregnancy. What that meant for me was that if I stood up for longer than a couple of minutes, my rapid heart beat so fast that it made me lose consciousness.

The OB, a specialist in multiple births, told me outright that he did not want to assume the responsibility of overseeing a higher risk pregnancy than he was comfortable with.

He said no other doctor would take me on either, which was not true, and strongly urged me to abort and “start over,” though there was never anything wrong with our twins, who are 28 and healthy.

I fired him that day, but know that not everyone is as stubborn as I am. And I did have trouble finding a cardiologist who would supervise my stubbornness. A couple of the heart doctors I saw said they, too, would only take me on as a patient if I ended the pregnancy.

As I’ve written before, the only cowboy who would treat me wound up decades later being one of Donald Trump’s favorite recommenders of hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19.

He took my case when no one else would, though, and came and checked on me at our house, too, which nobody does. So I’ll always be grateful, because that seven months I spent weak and on bed rest added up to the best investment of my life.

No matter what you think about abortion rights, that was my choice to make, right? And while I also agree with Democratic attempts to broaden the proposed bill to ban all reproductive coercion, I hope that they won’t let that keep them from supporting this measure.

There are lots of unanswered and maybe even unanswerable questions here, like who would enforce such a law. I mean, exactly which authorities would take the word of a female patient over an eminent practitioner?

Since even the kind of coercion otherwise known as rape is rarely prosecuted, how would this be different?

I would have reported my obstetrician to have kept the same thing from happening to anyone else. Yet can I imagine him in cuffs, or even in court, for pressuring me to silence the heartbeats I had already heard solely for his own convenience?

Not really. But sensitive as doctors are to the fear of legal penalties, this bill is worth passing anyway.