An opinion piece from a doctor today highlighted the problem:
As an abortion provider, my primary concerns are how this law could harm my patients' health. Last year, I treated a woman I'll call Lisa. She had two children at home and was pregnant with her third. Lisa suffered from heart disease - a condition that developed after her last delivery. Her condition had worsened substantially within the last week, and we were not sure how much longer her heart could withstand the strain of her pregnancy. After extensive counseling, we proceeded with an abortion using the method I deemed to be the safest for her at that time - the method Congress has banned. According to the Guttmacher Institute, about 2,200 women and their doctors reach that same decision every year.
But I will have to think long and hard about what I will do the next time I take care of a patient like Lisa. What am I supposed to say to her? "I'm sorry, but you're part of the small fraction of women our laws ignore?"
This underlines the vagueness question, almost an add-on given everything else, but covered in the lower courts. Medical decisions are fact specific and laws that might lead to financial ruin (clinics are easier targets by prosecutors than individual doctors) or even criminal indictments if it is deemed that there was some intent to breach the law clouds the issue. Medical decisions become legal ones. Trouble.
[A last word. I know someone morally opposed to abortion, but is strongly pro-choice as a legal matter. She finds this decision offensive, even though she is a mother with many children. This underlines the fiction of some of the rhetoric against abortion choice as a legal matter. Of course, she remembers when abortion was not legal, and teenagers had them illegally ... ruining their body in the process.]