Letters to the Editor: Saturday, Nov. 4, 2023

Despite what its opponents are saying, Issue 1 does not “go too far.” I am an obstetrics fellowship-trained family physician. For twenty years I have been helping women care for their health and the health of their families. In 2011, I spent eleven months working at a maternity hospital in Malawi, in Southern Africa. At the time Malawi had the third worst maternal mortality in the world — a woman there was 80 times as likely to die of pregnancy-related causes as a woman in the United States. At the hospital where I worked at least one mother died per week, often more. I saw everything that can go wrong with a pregnancy go wrong there, and it was heartbreaking. I will never forget the surgical first case I assisted. Dalitso was nineteen, presenting to the hospital gravely ill with an infection that we thought was coming from her uterus after attempting to cause an abortion on her own. The second the scalpel opened her abdomen more pus than I had ever seen in my life came pouring out. It just kept coming, a two-liter bottle of infection. Her uterus had to be taken out, but luckily none of her intestines. She made it through that surgery, and the surgery we did a week later to wash the infection out again, but two weeks after I first met her she went into septic shock, then cardiac arrest, and died. There were dozens of others who came in with similar situations over the next year. Some of them lived, but many of them died. All of them knew the risks of attempting an abortion without medical treatment, but their situations were dire enough they felt that the risk was worth it. It was absolutely, utterly devastating to watch, and it was completely foreign to me, because when it is done safely as part of the medical system abortion is incredibly safe. Watching women die from abortion is not an outcome that my generation of doctors has ever had to worry about, and it is not a risk that our patients ever had to face. Until now. People dying of back alley abortions is not a myth. Making abortions illegal doesn’t stop abortions, it only stops safe abortions. Abortion is healthcare, and these decisions should be between a pregnant patient and their doctor. It is up to us to protect these rights, so that every person can make the decision that is best for themselves. I cannot bear to witness women needlessly die again. Vote Yes for Issue 1 on November 7.

- Laura Chambers-Kersh, MD, Dayton