Letter to the Editor

Dear Editor:

I am writing in grateful response to the recent restraining order on Wyoming’s trigger abortion ban. District Judge Melissa Owens objected to the Wyoming legislature’s automatic refutation of a woman’s right to determine her own health decisions, after hearing a Jackson OB/GYN and her patient argue a most valid point.

That the ban violates a tenet in the Wyoming Constitution, regarding an individual’s right to make our own health care decisions, seems secondary, if confusing – seat belts, speed limits and vaccines notwithstanding. By illustration, in 1976 I learned the hard way that women’s health concerns are not treated equally everywhere.

My husband and I were living in Cheyenne, and a week after finding out I was pregnant with our first child, I started hemorrhaging. We drove to an area hospital’s emergency room where, after examining me, the attending doctor announced that I was having a “threatened abortion.”

He declared he couldn’t do anything about it and told me to go home. I was devastated, naturally, and more than a little confused. I called the Planned Parenthood office in Laramie.

The British doctor, her lilting accent sounding pointedly miffed, told me to get over there immediately. After settling me in the car, my husband and I drove the 50 miles west.

By the time we arrived, I was distraught, and the staff at the facility helped me understand the circumstances and, more important, allowed for my emotions. The doctor was incredulous I had been dismissed, and when asked “Which hospital?”

I muttered “de Paul.” I hadn’t realized that Catholic hospital physicians were (are?) not permitted to perform certain procedures like D&C, or dilation and curettage, which this staff prepared to do. Conscious during the process, I remember weeping as they made sure no tissue remained that could have caused sepsis – the infection leading to severe illness or even death.

The good doctor assured me that, sadly, my particular problem was not unusual, especially in first pregnancies. I don’t know if she was merely being kind and didn’t want me bearing undue responsibility for miscarrying, but I do know she attended me with compassion, care and good sense.

Women’s health (including access to safe terminations and birth control) is beyond the purview, moral or otherwise, of politicians, male or female, except for their responsibility to guarantee the right to seek and receive a good “standard of care,” through – it is to be hoped – respectful, honest and confidential conversations between practitioner and patient. There exist myriad reasons for terminations, e.g., miscarriage, ectopic pregnancy, and the circumstance a woman finds herself in with regard to a pregnancy, even apart from incest and rape.

These are deeply personal considerations, and not subject to parsimonious analysis by an insensible collective of legislators. Insensible to a particular woman’s situation and consciousness.

My sister-in-law drove up from Denver to take care of me after the miscarriage, a kindness I shall never forget. The helpful, deliberate British doctor, her nurse and my sister-in-law knew more about women’s health than the present U.S. Supreme Court.

Renée Carrier