Doctors who want to defy abortion laws say it's too risky

Since Roe v. Wade was overturned, 13 states have banned abortion except in the case of a medical emergency or serious health risk for the pregnant patient. But deciding what cases qualify for a medical exception can be a difficult judgement call for doctors.

News reports and court affidavits have documented how health care workers sometimes deny women abortion procedures in emergency situations – including NPR's story of a woman who was initially not treated for her miscarriage at an Ohio ER, though she'd been bleeding profusely for hours.

In Missouri, hospital doctors told a woman whose water broke at 18 weeks that "current Missouri law supersedes our medical judgment" and so she could not receive an abortion procedure even though she was at risk of infection, according to a report in the Springfield News-Leader.

That hospital is now under investigation for violating a federal law that requires doctors to treat and stabilize patients during a medical emergency.

And a survey by the Texas Policy Evaluation Project found clinicians sometimes avoided standard abortion procedures, opting instead for "hysterotomy, a surgical incision into the uterus, because it might not be construed as an abortion."

"That's just nuts," says. He's a physician who directs the Center for Bioethics and Humanities at the University of Colorado. "[A hysterotomy is] much more dangerous, much more risky – the woman may