An unnamed thirty-five year old woman was refused an emergency abortion at Elliot Hospital in Manchester, N.H., after her water broke only 14 weeks into her pregnancy.
Dr. Wayne Goldner of Elliot Hospital told the Boston Globe that he was forbidden from performing the abortion and had to arrange for the woman to be driven to another hospital eighty miles away. “I feel that it is deplorable due to Catholic church doctrine, a poor woman of very limited means is being forced to travel to an unfamiliar environment to have a procedure that is readily available from her trusted personal physicians,” said Goldner.
The hospital recently merged with a Catholic facility and now allows abortions only when a fetus has no potential to live outside the womb, even when a pregnancy threatens a woman’s health. A spokesperson for the hospital has claimed that Goldner did not give the hospital staff enough time to review the case.
Feminist News Stories on Abortion
