Dear Senators,
I am Dr. Lamb, an internist and pediatrician in the state of NH for the last 8 years. I strongly support both SB 399 and SB 436, but I can’t be in person at the hearing for the health of my family. I would like my testimony in the public record. We are at a moment of crisis for abortion rights and these two bills aim to help protect new hampshirites from the impending harm when Roe v. Wade is overturned.
SB 399: Repealing the abortion ban is critical for my patients who live real, complex private lives that require real, complex decisions in order to best protect their own health and the health of their families. SB399 is a blanket one-size-fits all law that assumes that law makers know better than high risk obstetricians and maternal fetal medicine experts about when an ultrasound is required and when an abortion is medically necessary. The longer that I am in medicine, the more I learn that truly every patient’s situation is unique. I have worked with patients with complex cardiovascular and pulmonary conditions that arise during their pregnancies, patients who are diagnosed with high grade cancers during pregnancies as well as devastating fetal anomalies discovered late in pregnancies. As lawmakers, you don’t need to help patients make very challenging life and death decisions about their own health care. You just need to pass SB399 so that Granite Staters can work with their health care teams to decide what is best for them.
SB436: Senators, this is your opportunity to protect the freedoms of the citizens you were elected to represent. We need protection to provide safe, legal abortion care if Roe vs. Wade is overturned at the national level. The NH state senate can support Roe v Wade and support people’s freedom to make their own private medical decisions, which includes abortion access. We can’t let NH follow in the path of Texas, where an abortion ban is forcing people to travel out of state for care or to carry a pregnancy to term against their will. Denying people with uterus’s abortion has been shown in the Turnaway study to have serious detrimental effects, including more life threatening pregnancy-related health complications, such as eclampsia. This study also showed that “the financial wellbeing and development of children is negatively impacted when their mothers are denied abortion”. Finally, people denied an abortion are more likely to have long lasting financial hardship than those who received an abortion. Health care, including safe abortion care, is a human right. AAA (SB436) would put abortion rights into statute in New Hampshire, thus ensuring that in NH, all citizens can truly live free.
Ashley Lamb MD MPH
Internal Medicine and Pediatric Physician
133 Madbury Rd.
Durham, NH 03824