Piglet pointed out in comments this excruciating exercise in Not Saying the W Word, and it’s so excruciating I have to point out every excrutiation.

Fear of ICE is keeping pregnant immigrants in Minnesota from critical care

All euphemisms for woman/women bolded from here on.

Health care providers said pregnant patients are having more complications linked to stress. But fear of immigration agents is keeping them from prenatal care.

Pregnant patients increasingly aren’t showing up for prenatal visits. Those who are are asking if they can have fewer. 

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Across the country, health care providers have said that people are increasingly skipping prenatal visits, citing concerns about raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

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Some patients, afraid of encountering law enforcement officials, are changing their delivery plans to opt for home births — sometimes without communicating it to providers. 

“We are seeing significant no-show rates for prenatal care visits in our clinics,” said Dr. Chelsea Thibodeau, a Minneapolis-based family physician who provides prenatal care and delivers babies at one of the hospitals. “We’ve certainly heard from patients in my clinic where they don’t feel safe coming in.” 

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists recommends that pregnant patients get regular prenatal care…

“Many, many conditions in pregnancy — whether it is anemia or high blood pressure or gestational diabetes or a growth restrictions — identifying those early and addressing them early, that can make a profound difference in fetal development and in the health of both a pregnant person and the fetus,” Thibodeau said. 

Another obstetrics provider, who asked that her name be withheld because she worries her clinic will become a target of immigration raids, said that since the start of the federal campaign, patients have been less likely to show up for visits, or to answer their phones. Those who do come in for care have expressed nervousness about coming back, or want to reduce their number of visits. 

Many, she said, are running out of food, which is particularly concerning in pregnancy, when doctors recommend patients consume an extra 300 calories per day. And when patients do come in, she said, she is seeing many at higher risk of gestational diabetes and high blood pressure, conditions that are most effectively treated when caught early in a pregnancy. 

One nurse-midwife, who works in the Twin CIties and predominantly treats Latinx patients, has seen three cases of preterm premature rupture of membranes (PPROM) — a rare complication in which someone’s water breaks early — since the start of the federal blitz, with two of those three resulting in miscarriage…

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Her patients are also consistently registering symptoms of depression, she said, a concern echoed by other providers across the area. Depression during or after pregnancy not only threatens the health of a pregnant person, but can harm a newborn, making it more difficult to breastfeed and undercutting the bonding between parent and infant.

Some obstetrics and gynecology providers are pivoting to in-home visits and mailing medications. But that isn’t possible to provide on scale, said Dr. Erin Stevens, an OB-GYN in Minnesota. Patients are increasingly requesting home births, including those with high-risk pregnancies that may require complex interventions.

Some patients are requesting doctors’ notes stating they are pregnant, said Dr. Kendra Harris, an OB-GYN in St. Paul whose no-show rate has also increased. The idea, she said, is that a physician’s endorsement might encourage ICE agents to treat them more gently. 

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And with patients less likely to attend key visits, physicians said they worry they are missing chances to intervene. 

“That’s the reason we see people for prenatal care is to make sure things are healthy and well to make sure we can catch complications,” Stevens said. “We’re going to have a lot of people showing up when it’s time to have their baby with complications we don’t know about.”

Thibodeau recalled one recent patient with a history of previable delivery, putting her at higher risk of losing her pregnancy.

That’s a LOT of anxious erasure of women. To be fair, saying patient/patients some of the time would not necessarily be bullshit, but in a context in which the word women is banned entirely then yes, “patients” is just more of the same bullshit.