High-Risk Pregnancy After Roe: Dr. David Hackney on the Impossible Choices Doctors Face

What happened to high-risk pregnancy care after Dobbs?

Dr. David Hackney — a maternal-fetal medicine specialist and author of Impossible Choices — joins me to explain how abortion bans are changing decisions around preeclampsia, fetal anomalies, and pregnancy complications for doctors and patients across the country.
Dr. Hackney is Professor of Reproductive Biology at Case Western Reserve University and Division Chief of Maternal-Fetal Medicine — and he was a leading advocate for moms and babies in Ohio when Dobbs came down.

David's new book, Impossible Choices: A Physician's Guidance on High-Risk Pregnancy in a World Without Roe, is out now from MIT Press. Drawing on real cases — preeclampsia, ruptured membranes, fetal anomalies, cancer during pregnancy — he lays out exactly what's changed for patients and physicians navigating high-risk pregnancy in banned and restricted states, and what it's actually cost doctors to keep speaking out.

We get into the stories, the legal mechanics of "exceptions" that don't work like you might think they do, and what it's really like to be a physician-advocate in this moment.

Get Impossible Choices: A Physician's Guidance on High-Risk Pregnancy in a World Without Roe at bookstore.org, amazon.com, and your local bookseller.

Instagram: @davidnhackney

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Dr. Kristin Lyerly is an OB-GYN based in northeast Wisconsin and a leading voice on healthcare, politics, and the issues shaping our collective future. As the named physician plaintiff in a landmark Wisconsin abortion decision, she brings a perspective to these conversations that goes beyond politics. New episodes drop every week. Subscribe to stay current on reproductive rights, health politics, all things Wisconsin, and everything else that matters.

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