![]() ![]() Neither hospital immediately provided comment on the case. It’s unclear why University of Kansas Health refused to offer Farmer one. In Kansas, when Farmer visited the hospital, abortions were still legal up to 22 weeks. for violations of the law.Ībortions are largely banned in Missouri, but there are exceptions for medical emergencies. The federal government can investigate hospitals that receive Medicare and Medicaid money - which encompasses most facilities in the U.S. Weeks after the Supreme Court’s ruling, the Democratic administration reminded hospitals that federal law requires them to offer an abortion when a pregnant woman is at risk for an emergency medical condition. President Joe Biden’s administration has prodded hospitals not to turn away patients in those situations, even when state law forbids abortions. Across the country, women have reported being turned away from hospitals for abortions, despite doctors telling them that this puts them at further risk for infection or even death. It was bad enough to be so powerless.”įarmer’s complaints launched the first investigations that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, or CMS, has publicly acknowledged since Roe v. “I felt like I was responsible to do something, to say something, to not have this happen again to another woman. It was horrible not to get the care to save your life,” Farmer, who lives in Joplin, said of her experience. Ultimately, Farmer had to travel to an abortion clinic in Illinois. READ MORE: Washington, Minnesota become transgender and abortion sanctuaries Doctors at both hospitals told Mylissa Farmer that her fetus would not survive, that her amniotic fluid had emptied and that she was at risk for serious infection or losing her uterus, but they would not terminate the pregnancy because a fetal heartbeat was still detectable. ![]() The federal agency’s investigation centers on two hospitals - Freeman Health System in Joplin, Missouri, and University of Kansas Hospital in Kansas City, Kansas - that in August refused to provide an abortion to a Missouri woman whose water broke early at 17 weeks of pregnancy. “We want her, and every patient out there like her, to know that we will do everything we can to protect their lives and health, and to investigate and enforce the law to the fullest extent of our legal authority, in accordance with orders from the courts.” But she never should have gone through the terrifying ordeal she experienced in the first place,” Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra said. The competing edicts have been rolled out since the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to an abortion last year.īut federal law, which requires doctors to treat patients in emergency situations, trumps those state laws, the nation’s top health official said in a statement. The findings, revealed in documents obtained by The Associated Press, are a warning to hospitals around the country as they struggle to reconcile dozens of new state laws that ban or severely restrict abortion with a federal mandate for doctors to provide abortions when a woman’s health is at risk. WASHINGTON (AP) - Two hospitals that refused to provide an emergency abortion to a pregnant woman who was experiencing premature labor put her life in jeopardy and violated federal law, a first-of-its-kind investigation by the federal government has found. ![]()
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