The problem of pregnant people sometimes needing to end a pregnancy
is still gonna be there.
And hospitals are working right now and should be working
in conjunction with some experts in the field and with their legal teams
around developing some policies and making really clear guidelines
for everybody who works within that hospital system about how to provide care.
I'm lucky enough to be working mostly in San Francisco
in a state that is dedicated to protecting reproductive rights.
Like, not only to not taking away reproductive rights, but actually to protect them.
We're not dealing with kind of this immediate onslaught
that some of my colleagues are dealing with in states like Missouri
or states where it's immediately become illegal.
We are trying to figure out kind of what role we're playing.
We are trying to figure out how to scale up services for a potential increase in patient volume.
We may not see that increase in patient volume like they will in Southern California,
or already are starting to see in Southern California, since they're right on the border with Arizona.
At UCSF, we have long been a leader in experts in training in abortion.
And so we are really trying to examine all of the different types of trainees who we host
and trying to maximize our ability to train people.
At the national level, you know, there's a lot of collaboration going on.
There's a tremendous amount of communication going on
between the legal community, the medical community, and communities, as well,
to really try to figure out how everybody can best partner to help people access safe abortion.
We have the same treatments for abortion and miscarriage.
For both of those conditions, a person can use medications
or a person can undergo a procedure.
So I, you know, I would encourage health care providers that it's not necessary—
it never was really necessary to, to know if somebody was sort of on their own ending a pregnancy
or if this pregnancy ended on its own.
Those are irrelevant.
And not only irrelevant, I think now we know it could expose persons
to some vulnerability within the criminal justice system.
Number 2, you need to treat the person in front of you.
This is why we have all joined this profession, and that has not changed.
For patients, a similar piece of advice.
You don't need to be telling anybody that you had an abortion.
Again, a miscarriage can look just like an abortion,
and any side effects that you're having from an attempted abortion
can be the same side effects that you're having from a miscarriage.
That can certainly be utilized for people who are in states where it's illegal.
Biden signing this executive order is better than nothing.
And I do think that there's a lot of value in sending a message
to the medical community across the United States
that these are still expectations of health care providers.
HIPAA laws, privacy laws are really sacred in health care.
Sending a message is very powerful.
I would certainly hope that it actually comes with some teeth to it.
This really needs to be something that is standardized across, across the states.
I think it really just kind of rests back on what some of the real tenets of abortion care
and of reproductive health care are,
which is providing the care that someone asks for when they need it.
Abortion care really is a human right.
Those of us who work in this area really understand it as such.