New York Times won't correct its errant essay on ectopic pregnancy

[Celerity]

Memo to the New York Times: It’s a bad time to publish inaccurate information about pregnancies.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/12/new-york-times-essay-ectopic-pregnancy-error/



In a July 4 guest essay on ectopic pregnancy for the Times, Leah Libresco Sargeant used language that doesn’t meet medical standards for discussion and treatment of such conditions, as a social media furor promptly pointed out. In an apparent effort to host an array of opinions, the Times privileged the author’s linguistic preferences over the greater imperative to convey precise, factual information to readers. That mistake comes at a fraught moment to be writing about women’s health, as new battles over reproductive rights have turned the beat into a linguistic and ideological minefield.

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The Supreme Court’s decision last month overturning Roe v. Wade has not clarified the regulatory environment but upended it. Concerns arising from the conflicts in state abortion policies include how medical providers will treat patients with pregnancy complications. STAT, for instance, reported that a woman experiencing an ectopic pregnancy days after the court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health had to wait for a Missouri hospital’s ethics committee to sign off on her treatment.

Ectopic pregnancies are potentially fatal for the mother — and always fatal for the fetus. Will hospitals treat these cases as aggressively as they did before the court’s decision in Dobbs? “The lack of specificity over what counts as a threat to the mother’s life means some doctors feel pressure to sit and watch patients’ health deteriorate until they’re able to intervene,” reported STAT. In her Times piece, Sargeant defined ectopic pregnancy as one in which “the baby implants somewhere other than the uterus.” And the essay noted that the “situation is fatal for the baby” and dangerous for the mother.

In the vast majority of ectopic pregnancies, the embryo lodges in the fallopian tubes — a perilous development, physician Beverly Gray explains to the Erik Wemple Blog. “It’s a very narrow tube, and you have an embryo that’s traveling along the tube. The tube is not hospitable for the development of a pregnancy and what happens is it stretches to the point where it’s super thin and that can cause an emergent situation: Hemorrhage and bleeding,” says Gray, an associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Duke University School of Medicine.

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[Solly Mack]

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