Pregnant and hemorrhaging, without a key solution within reach | The Lens
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Lawmakers passed a law designed to limit reproductive rights in Louisiana. But it may also limit patients’ chances of surviving common life events like miscarriages and births.

During pregnancy, the amount of blood in the body increases 50%. But it can dip to low – and deadly – levels within minutes.

Pregnancy complications, most often during delivery and miscarriage, can trigger critical, excessive bleeding. That bleeding, postpartum hemorrhage, is the leading cause of maternal death worldwide.

To combat it, doctors routinely reach for the medication misoprostol.

“I have it in every single delivery room,” said an obstetrician who’s practiced in New Orleans since 2017. “ I can have it in 45 seconds.”

He needs it that fast, he said, because obstetric hemorrhage can progress quickly, making it possible for a patient to lose a significant amount of blood in a short amount of time. “It’s terrifying,” said the obstetrician, who asked that his name not be used because of the divisive politics of abortion in Louisiana.

To him, misoprostol at the bedside is “tantamount to maternal health.”

Come October 1, that will change.

[…]

[A] new law limits not only people’s reproductive rights, but their very ability to survive common life events, like a miscarriage or the delivery of a child.