Louisiana woman criticizes AG Murrill over comments about her abortion story
3rd September 2024 · 0 Comments
By Rosemary Westwood
WWNO/WRKF
A Louisiana woman who spoke at the Democratic National Convention about being denied miscarriage care in the wake of Louisiana’s abortion ban is criticizing Attorney General Liz Murrill and anti-abortion leaders for their reactions to her speech.
Kaitlyn Joshua was about 11 weeks pregnant when she started miscarrying in the fall of 2022, just a few months after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and triggered Louisiana’s near-total abortion ban. Joshua sought care at two separate hospitals – Woman’s Hospital in Baton Rouge and Baton Rouge General in Prairieville – and was turned away from both without treatment.
WWNO, NPR and KFF Health News first reported Joshua’s story in 2022. She has been sharing it routinely in the lead-up to the election in events across the country and on national television as she campaigns to elect a Democratic president to the White House. But her speech during the Democratic National Convention was the most high-profile and spawned a series of headlines in Louisiana and across the country.
After Joshua’s speech, Murrill posted on X that “Democrats have their facts wrong.”
“There is nothing in our bipartisan law that prohibits emergency care for someone having a miscarriage or any emergency situation during pregnancy. Nothing. Hard stop,” Murrill posted.
“In fact, doctors are legally required to care for a pregnant woman who suffers an emergent health crisis, whether that’s appendicitis or a miscarriage,” she continued.
News reports quote Murrill’s original post, which appears to have been edited, as stating that the law “was passed under Governor John Bel Edwards’ term.”
“It is so damaging, the fact that the Republican Party cannot own the fact that the reason why we’re in the predicament that we’re in as it relates to reproductive rights in Louisiana is 100 percent their fault,” Joshua told WWNO/WRKF in an interview.
“It is typical Republican behavior for them to denounce any possibility of having any accountability for their actions,” Joshua added, “them not wanting to look it in the face and see what it really looks like, what impact looks like when you pass laws that are harmful, especially what it looks like through the lens of Black maternal health.”
Women in Louisiana face some of the highest rates of maternal death and morbidity in the nation and Black women in the state are more than twice as likely to die as a result of their pregnancy as white women. One study from The Commonwealth Fund found that states with abortion restrictions are more likely to have fewer maternal health services and higher rates of deaths and morbidity. Research released earlier this year from Tulane University found that abortion restrictions are associated with an increased risk of maternal death.
Under Louisiana’s ban, doctors face up to 15 years in prison and $200,000 in fines for violating the law. It requires doctors to provide a diagnosis in a woman’s medical records along with proof from an ultrasound that a pregnancy “has ended or is in the unavoidable and untreatable process of ending due to spontaneous miscarriage.” Doctors have said that’s a high legal bar of proof that can make it difficult to act swiftly to treat miscarriages. In some miscarriage cases, a fetus can still have a faint heartbeat, which is what happened the first time Joshua sought care.
Earlier this year, a detailed report found multiple cases of women being turned away from hospitals while miscarrying. One doctor reported that hospital officials stopped a woman’s abortion while they debated whether her treatment was legal under Louisiana’s ban. The report found other dangerous changes to pregnancy care in Louisiana, including physicians giving women unnecessary and invasive C-sections to avoid even the appearance of providing an abortion.
Republican lawmakers killed bills in the last two legislative sessions that were aimed at easing the burdens and threats contained in the law for health care providers, including requiring solely a doctor’s diagnosis that a pregnancy is ending before providing care.
Lawmakers also rejected bills to add rape and incest exceptions to the law.
Joshua told WWNO / WRKF that the “logical thing” to do after two years of impacts on pregnancy care and maternal health would be to make changes to the law.
“You guys were very proud of the work that you did in 2022 to obliterate our rights around reproductive health care in our state,” Joshua said, referring to Republicans, including Murrill.
“And now you’re seeing it play out in real time, and it’s looking you in the face, and instead of you taking accountability for it, you want to kind of put it on someone else, like John Bel [Edwards].”
Louisiana’s ban was authored by Democratic lawmaker Katrina Jackson, passed by a Republican majority in the legislature, and signed by Edwards.
Before being elected attorney general, Murrill was Louisiana’s solicitor general, during which time she helped defend Louisiana’s abortion ban. She worked under then-Attorney General, now Gov. Jeff Landry. When state courts briefly halted Louisiana’s abortion ban in the summer of 2022, Landry threatened doctors with prosecution if they provided abortion care.
Louisiana Right to Life also released a statement Wednesday defending the state’s abortion ban and calling Joshua’s story an example of “gross misinterpretation” of the law by health care providers.
Communications director Sarah Zagorski said the responsibility for Joshua’s care lies with hospitals that misinterpreted the law, and that the law clearly allows for miscarriage treatment.
“Unfortunately, the DNC is utilizing a tragic story to elicit confusion and disapproval for pro-life laws,” Zagorski said in a statement. “They are not concealing their agenda, but proudly providing abortions at their own convention.”
Louisiana Right to Life also released statements from a New Orleans OBGYN who said she continues to treat miscarriages, and Tara Wicker, the director of Louisiana Black Advocates for Life.
“There is no denying Kaitlyn Joshua experienced inadequate healthcare in the community I love dearly. I also acknowledge there are systemic problems in our health system, which especially impacts women of color,” Wicker said. “However, these problems are not alleviated or solved by legal abortion.”
Joshua pushed back on Zagorski’s claim that the law clearly allows for miscarriage treatment and asked what relevance comments from a New Orleans OBGYN bore to her case.
In an Instagram post, Joshua said it was “alarming” to see Murrill comment on her case nearly two years after she first began telling her story.
“If Liz wanted to highlight the Black maternal health care crisis that we see in the state of Louisiana, she could have done that, but instead, she chose to use her power and her voice to obliterate someone’s story,” Joshua said.
Joshua said that she wanted people to know “what’s happening in our state of Louisiana, where women speak out and then they are pressured or threatened or get messages from an attorney general.”
She added that Murrill had not reached out to her personally, but said she would be “happy” to talk to Murrill about her experience “and we don’t need to hide behind social media or public statements.”
Murrill’s comments on X that “doctors are legally required to care for a pregnant woman who suffers an emergent health crisis” appears to refer to the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, known as EMTALA, which requires hospitals that received Medicare or Medicaid funding to provide stabilizing treatment for all patients.
But her office has argued that EMTALA should not require emergency treatment for pregnant women if that treatment is banned by state law.
In 2022, the Biden administration sued Idaho in the wake of that state’s abortion ban – amid stories of women routinely being flown out of state to get care because of the ban. Earlier this year, the U.S. Supreme Court temporarily allowed emergency abortions in Idaho.
Idaho had argued that state law takes precedence over EMTALA, meaning that the federal requirement for emergency medical treatment should not be extended to pregnancies in states with abortion bans. It also argued that a fertilized egg qualifies as a patient.
Murrill, as Louisiana’s attorney general, signed an amicus brief to the U.S. Supreme Court along with 21 other states siding with Idaho and arguing that “EMTALA cannot be read to preempt state laws regulating medicine, including abortion restrictions.”
This article originally published in the September 2, 2024 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
