Idaho city's only hospital blames anti-abortion laws as it ends obstetrical services

[jgo]

Source: The Hill

The only hospital in Sandpoint, Idaho, has announced it will no longer provide obstetrical services, blaming stringent restrictions on reproductive care enacted by the state’s government.

According to the Idaho Statesman, which first reported the change at Bonner General, Idaho has one of the most severe bans on abortion in the U.S., with state physicians facing felony charges and revocation of their licenses if they violate the law.

“Highly respected, talented physicians are leaving. Recruiting replacements will be extraordinarily difficult,” the hospital said in its news release. “In addition, the Idaho Legislature continues to introduce and pass bills that criminalize physicians for medical care nationally recognized as the standard of care. Consequences for Idaho Physicians providing the standard of care may include civil litigation and criminal prosecution, leading to jail time or fines.”

Bonner General delivered 265 babies in 2022, according to the Statesman.


Read more: https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/3909594-idaho-citys-only-hospital-blames-anti-abortion-laws-as-it-ends-obstetrical-services/

[Bettie]

1. Maternal and infant mortality

are about to skyrocket in Idaho and probably other states as well.

Ah, yes, the right wing care for the unborn...but anyone else.

[roamer65]

4. Not in Michigan.

Reproductive sanity still prevails here.

[Bettie]

5. And that is good

Women in Iowa can go to Minnesota or Illinois.

[roamer65]

6. Which pisses me off to no end.

So stupid for something that is just a basic human right.

[mahina]

16. What, it's not jard enough already to have a baby after travel out of state? Crazy

Last edited Thu Mar 23, 2023, 01:42 PM - Edit history (1)

Nuts.

[Bettie]

17. I agree, but the whackjobs in our state legislature

are doing everything they can to make this state impossible to live in if you aren't an old white christofascist.

[mahina]

20. Im so sorry

For the new moms and all women especially

[NullTuples]

2. And to go along with that as well as a bit of CYA, they're letting go of their...

"Maternal Mortality Review Committee" which is the only group in the state government tasked with tracking and reporting on maternal deaths from childbirth. By letting go I mean they're intentionally not renewing the law that created it. Probably because when abortion is prohibited, maternal deaths go up. Likewise, when obstetrical care is lost, maternal deaths go up. And that would make Republicans look bad. So the solution is to get rid of the tracking and reporting of such deaths, obviously.

[mpcamb]

8. After the first resulting maternal death, take a case as far as it will go

that blames the legislators, individually if possible, for causing it.

They drove practitioners out of reach for patients for medical care nationally recognized as the standard of care.

They are culpable.
Carry it all the way to the Supreme Court and rub their filthy, conspiring,
murderous noses in it, too.

[Runningdawg]

3. Women should make that city a ghost town. And nurses should be the first out the door.

[TeamProg]

7. Let the educated leave the state, Dr. Nick Riviera is ready to serve.

[link:

[pfitz59]

9. I have two Grand Nieces in the Sandpoint area, both born at that hospital

wonder where their kids will be born? Sandpoint and environs is ground zero for MAGAts.

[CTyankee]

10. I predict "brain drain" in Idaho. Talented, smart people will move to states with reproductive

freedom. Why put up with medieval government and thinking when other states offer intellectual and
personal freedom?

[Warpy]

11. Sounds like OB-Gyn doctors are voting with their feet

and I can't blame them, their liability insurance premiums are already confiscatory. Having their hands tied when a woman's death is entirely preventable if modern medical standards are adhered to will only increase the burden, not to mention the toll on them emotionally as they have to watch young women die because of a Bronze Age book written by men and misinterpreted by other men.

Women will need to look for midwives. I've known lay midwives (meaning not nurses) who have been very good. I've also known one or two who were ignorant and a menace to their patients, thinking they could pray complications away instead of getting the woman to a hospital. So women who don't want to drive for an hour or more in labor are taking a chance.

It's going to be just like that in a lot of areas in red states.

[MayReasonRule]

12. Yep! Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida etc. ad nauseum

[Vogon_Glory]

13. How long until Northern Idaho becomes an obstetric desert?

One of those questions social reactionaries are going to squirm like a bucket of eels to avoid answering.

[Mosby]

14. The Hill article skips over a lot of details.

From Wapo:

Financial and staffing problems are cited as the main factors affecting the availability of hospital-based care in rural areas, the U.S. Government Accountability Office wrote in an October 2022 report. Delivering babies is costly, requiring round-the-clock coverage by trained doctors and nurses. Obstetrics units often carry the largest financial losses for rural hospitals, according to a care provider association, a research group and others who talked to the Government Accountability Office. As a result, they were the “first to close” when hospitals became cash-strapped.

At Bonner General Health, spokeswoman Erin Binnall said birthrates have declined for years, with a nationwide trend playing a role. The hospital delivered 265 babies in 2022 — a 37.5 percent decrease from 2008, when the number was 424. The challenges mounted when two of three pediatricians who worked with the hospital decided to no longer take calls from it beginning in May.

Bonner “is making all attempts to continue deliveries” through May 19, the statement said. But its ability to do so is dependent on staffing.

Binnall said that while staffing concerns were the main factor leading to the closure, “Idaho’s political and legal climate does pose as a barrier specific to recruitment and retention for OBGYNs.” She noted that Idaho ranks last in the nation for active physicians and that there are 178 OB/GYNs practicing statewide, with just 38 in rural areas.

Caitlin Gustafson, a family-medicine physician in McCall, Idaho, who provides obstetric care and serves as a member of the Idaho Coalition for Safe Reproductive Health Care, said family-medicine doctors often get training in Idaho for rural obstetric care and leave to practice elsewhere. Recruitment became harder after Idaho’s abortion ban went into effect, she said.

“This was a problem before, and now it’s just basically exploding in terms of who we’re going to be able to maintain and recruit in the state to be able to provide this care,” she said.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/03/21/idaho-hospital-baby-delivery-abortion/

[jmowreader]

15. There are two significant issues at play here

First, forget the “reproductive freedom” issue. We have none, but in North Idaho we never have. The Planned Parenthood clinic in Spokane takes care of all North Idaho’s abortions. If you need a life saving abortion, they load you into a helicopter and fly you to Deaconess - the main non-Catholic hospital in town. That’s how it is, how it was, how it always will be.

Issue 1 is BGH basically went broke on obstetrics. You CANNOT maintain a modern obstetrics suite on less than a baby a day. The other two small-town Idaho hospitals, the 20-bed Boundary Community Hospital and the 19-bed Benewah Community Hospital, got out of this business many years ago and none of you noticed. True story: for decades the St. Maries Gazette-Record, the local weekly newspaper, did a front-page story on the first baby of the year born at Benewah Community Hospital. The last year they were able to run one, it was in a March edition. The twenty people who’d already had babies by that time delivered them in Spokane.

Issue 2 are the 800-pound gorillas in the room: Kootenai Health in Coeur d’Alene, and the four general hospitals in Spokane - Deaconess, Sacred Heart, Holy Family and Valley Hospital. If you’re having a routine delivery, you go there.

Who’s going to have the worst problem with this are the people who live north of Sandpoint. When Boundary Community Hospital closed its obstetrics operation women in that area started going to Sandpoint - which is about an hour’s drive away. Kootenai Health is two hours from Bonners, and Holy Family, the closest Spokane hospital to Bonners Ferry, is a bit farther. I suspect the Spokane and Coeur d’Alene hotels will be doing a good trade in North Idaho women staying there until their babies are born.

[yardwork]

18. This trend had already been happening. These new laws accelerate it.

Hospitals all over the country - especially in rural communities - have been dropping obstetric care. These new laws are nails in the coffin.

Ultimately, I believe that fewer doctors than ever will choose to deliver babies. The consequences are horrific. Women and babies will die.

The U.S. needs to be increasing reimbursement for obstetrical care, not adding new burdens. We are so backward. It's appalling.

[Ilsa]

19. Only older couples will move there, but not any woman

with a family history of post-menopause reproductive system health issues.