Author: Chloe Nazra Lee

Chloe Nazra Lee, MD, MPH, is a resident physician in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York. Her professional interests include women’s mental health, trauma disorders, and working with survivors of abuse.

A Thousand Little Moments: The Insidious Loss of Women’s Freedom to Christian Nationalism

Leaving a toxic marriage also meant temporarily abandoning my dream of motherhood. I grieve the loss of the future I imagined. Perhaps one day, I will have my own baby who will know how much she was wanted and loved. That dream is deferred. But the dream is altogether shattered for many women, in the wake of the Alabama Supreme Court ruling that frozen embryos are considered children. Republicans cannot ignore their role in this devastating turn.

Women are losing both the right to end unwanted or dangerous pregnancies and the right to become pregnant. The common factor is the loss of women’s choice. If our country’s concept of family stability relies on depriving women of their choices, we do not have stable families; we have prisoners.

Abortion Bans Increase the Need for Survivor Support

The best thing that we as physicians can do is to believe women, holding their hands and offering our unconditional support as we guide them through the pain and connect them to the healthcare resources that suit their best interests. This includes access to safe, legal abortion, a narrow avenue for recourse that recent and current GOP candidates threaten to narrow further.

But I am one doctor. There is only so much that I can do. I cannot single-handedly change our society.

Right-Wing Hubris Puts Ideology Over Medical Expertise—And Women Suffer

Texas anti-abortion lawmakers’ decisions enforce inferior medical care that harms women, prioritizing personal belief over evidence-based medicine and codifying misogyny into standard of care. The most recent decision by the Fifth Circuit, which allows denial of an emergency abortion to a critically ill pregnant patient, highlights the chilling truth that the life of the mother is not, in fact, a priority in the eyes of the law.

As physicians, we can follow neither our ethics nor appropriate standard of care if uninformed politicians flagrantly disrespect our training. If they can undermine our careful decision-making with brute force and no medical qualifications, then what is the point of our expertise?