The judge’s stance on abortion is hardly a mystery. Ask any OB-GYN like myself, and they’ll tell you: We’re doomed.
The genius of Judge Amy Coney Barrett is that she is wholesome, motherly and quietly productive—the keystone characteristics of old-world femininity and class. Make no mistake, however, Barrett is poised to bury reproductive rights and, more broadly, women’s health as we know it. As an OB-GYN with specialized training in abortion care, I have treated many patients with heartbreaking stories about how, when the unspeakable happened in their very wanted pregnancies, the political system denied them access to safe and reliable care. One such story was of a young woman who, at 20 weeks pregnant, found out that her baby was missing both his kidneys and would either not live to take his first breath or would survive until birth but then struggle to breathe before dying in his mother’s arms. The latter option was too cruel for her to imagine. She called her insurance company, which denied the procedure because even though abortion was covered in her state, her company had contracted with an out-of-state insurance firm in Utah, where abortion at her gestation age was illegal unless to save her life.
