Like many of my friends, I’m having too many Alice in Wonderland days when everything seems topsy-turvy. Today was one of those days.
I drove my Forrester to the dealership for a 60,000 mile service and state inspection. The car is five years old and has fewer than 26,000 miles on it. We don’t get out much. I got out of the dealership with an $18 bill for the inspection. The car needed no other service. I admit that it gave me just a slight happy.
On the way home, I listened to some MSNBC coverage of the SCOTUS case brought by Idaho against the Federal government’s EMTALA requirement that people in a medical emergency not be transferred from one hospital to another without first being stabilized. In the case of an ectopic pregnancy, uncontrolled Eclampsia, placenta previa with acute hemorrhage (aka threatened abortion/incipient miscarriage), Idaho’s abortion ban would prohibit providing a life-saving termination of pregnancy unless the woman were literally dying. At risk of losing her uterus or having a stroke, don’t count as a threat of imminent death. It’s not clear to me that sepsis would count.
So, the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology (ACOG), the College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP), and the AMA submitted a brief asking that the Idaho law be given measurable, objective parameters for imminent risk of death. How many units of blood must a woman lose to reach that threshold? One? Two? Five? How low must her blood pressure be? 90/60? 80/50? The presence of hypovolemic shock?
And this is what is topsy-turvy. The brief presents the paradox of having medical experts in obstetrics, emergency medicine, and medicine in general asking attorneys to define what constitutes a life-threatening medical emergency. C’mon! How focked is that?
The proposition is completely topsy-turvy, and all the men on the Supreme Court are totally oblivious to the absurdity. What a bunch of intellectual zeroes. What a blind spot. What total absence of common focking sense!