Dr. Catherine Romanos on WOSU’s All Sides
Blog | June 28, 2024
This week on WOSU’s All Sides with Anna Staver, we heard from Central Ohio abortion provider Dr. Catherine Romanos, in addition to other show guests as they looked back on two years of Dobbs and reflected on the current state of abortion rights under our new Ohio Reproductive Freedom Amendment.
Listen to the episode on the WOSU website or read the transcript below:
Anna Staver:
You’re listening to All Sides. I’m your host, Anna Staver. Doctor Catherine Romanos is an abortion provider here in Ohio. She’s been in practice for six years, watching as Ohio added each new restriction as the Supreme Court overturned federal protections for the procedure. As the “heartbeat bill” became law and as Ohio voters added abortion protections into the state’s constitution. She joins me now to talk about access to abortion here in Ohio. Doctor Romanos, welcome to All Sides.
Doctor Catherine Romanos:
Thank you for having me. I’ve actually been practicing abortion in Ohio since 2013, so I’ve seen even more laws implement it than just the six years.
Anna Staver:
As a reproductive health care provider. On the day of the Dobbs decision. Can you remind us what it was like that day?
Doctor Catherine Romanos:
I remember so vividly because I had Covid, I was quarantined on my back porch, and had already called in to work. I couldn’t go in and provide that day because I was sick. So I felt incredibly helpless that, everyone’s world was getting turned upside down, and I couldn’t help. So, I sent my partner out for some Sudafed, and I got on press calls and tried to do what I could from my back porch. But I should say that we weren’t surprised by Dobbs. We were disappointed, but we weren’t surprised. We had been preparing for that day, for many months and even longer, knowing that people who oppose abortion had been working towards that decision for a really long time.
Anna Staver:
And it had leaked. And we weren’t completely sure that it was the final decision, but it gave everybody, at the very least, a heads up.
Doctor Catherine Romanos:
Yeah, we started preparing in December when we heard the or oral arguments. Then when the leak came out, we ramped up our efforts to start thinking about how we were going to get patients taking care of.
Anna Staver:
The heartbeat bill banning almost all abortion in Ohio went into effect almost immediately. Did your clinic have to call and cancel patients?
Doctor Catherine Romanos:
We did. It was chaos. It was really, really scary for us and for patients because primarily, no one wants to break the law. We were all just trying to follow the law of patients and providers. We were trying to figure out where patients could go to get safe and legal care. We were trying to figure out what we could do for our patients legally. I so vividly remember more than one patient saying to me, I made my appointment last Monday. I don’t understand why I’m not allowed to have my abortion today, this Monday. All we could say was your rights were taken away over the weekend.
Anna Staver:
The law eventually goes on hold, and we sit in this legal gray limbo until November 2023, when Ohio voters decide to add abortion protections to the state constitution. But it actually hasn’t changed much legally, because the heartbeat bill is still a law in Ohio. It’s just on permanent pause.
Doctor Catherine Romanos:
Yeah, and we’re still waiting to hear from the courts about what will happen. We’ll hear any day on that. Now, I would say that from the time that Dobbs came down to the time the amendment passed, we were all, kind of living with an underlying level of anxiety about, you know, for myself and my coworkers, we were worried about our jobs. But for patients, we were worried about if they would be okay, where they would go, who was going to help them. I think it was more than anything, really confusing. It was confusing for patients to figure out what they needed to do to get their health care. Then it was even confusing for really well-meaning health care providers who wanted to help direct patients. But things were changing so rapidly that even the well-meaning pro-choice Ob-Gyn in Upper Arlington couldn’t quite keep up with where they could send patients, and how they could help their patients.
Anna Staver:
It also appears to have been confusing for a lot of prominent Republicans. Here’s governor Mike DeWine the day he signed that heartbeat bill into law in 2019.
Previously recorded audio of Mike DeWine:
The essential function of government is to protect the most vulnerable among us. Those who do not have a voice. Government’s role should be to protect life. From the beginning to the end. To protect those who cannot protect themselves, such as the elderly, the unborn, those who are sick, those who have a disability, those who have a mental illness or an addiction. The signing of this bill today is consistent with that respect for life and the imperative to protect those who cannot protect themselves.
Anna Staver:
And then here’s the governor after the abortion amendment passed last November.
Previously recorded audio of Mike DeWine:
I think if there had been exceptions for rape and incest, as I asked for there to be, I don’t know if we’d had a different outcome or not, but I think it would have given people a better, a better choice. That is something that I will always, will always feel.
Anna Staver:
What is it been like to watch Republicans move from no abortions at all, which the heartbeat bill did not contain exemptions for rape or incest, to supporting things like a 15 week national limit?
Doctor Catherine Romanos:
I think it gives me a little bit of whiplash. In the first statement that you played, from Governor DeWine. He listed a number of really vulnerable populations, all of whom I care about deeply as a family doctor. the one population he didn’t mention were pregnant people. He never talked about a person who is pregnant and in a vulnerable situation. One could say that anyone who’s pregnant is in a vulnerable situation. He left them off that list. I didn’t hear him add those people to his list of vulnerable populations that he wanted to protect. I can’t speak to his political motives. but I would hope that he is learning that this is health care, and you can’t just strip it away without horrible, horrible, life threatening consequences.
Anna Staver:
We heard from Ohio Right to Life president Mike Gonidakis earlier in this hour. But I want to ask you the same question I asked him. Do you think those who oppose abortion have experienced the cautionary cliche, “be careful what you wish for”?
Doctor Catherine Romanos:
No. I don’t know. I’m a doctor, right? I care about this a lot. But I am not in the business of interpreting political fights.
Anna Staver:
Does it ever frustrate you, then, that it gets so political?
Doctor Catherine Romanos:
Yes. I’m a doctor. I shouldn’t know what a circuit court on banc opinion means, right? Like, there are things that I have had to learn in my career as an abortion provider that are not medicine. And have they gotten what they asked for? I don’t know. I have my patients haven’t gotten what they asked for. You know, even before Dobbs, abortion was really, really hard to access in Ohio and in many other states. It hasn’t changed much since the amendment, and we have a lot of work left to do to make this very basic health care accessible.
Anna Staver:
Yeah. Lawsuit has also been filed here in Ohio to remove the 24 hour mandatory waiting period for abortions. You are a plaintiff in that lawsuit, so we won’t dive into the details. But I want to ask a more general question about how much confusion all of these laws, all of these court decisions, all of these amendments have had for your patients.
Doctor Catherine Romanos:
It’s so heartbreaking. It’s so, so heartbreaking. I would say that several times a month I have someone, you know, I’ll I’ll go through the whole process with them ultrasounds, lab work, counseling, and we’ll signed an informed consent. At the end of the the visit to try and make an appointment for their abortion, they’ll lean in and they’ll say, is this legal?
I’ll say, yes, of course this is legal. I’m a board certified doctor. I want to provide you with safe legal care. and even coming to a clinic, with a real doctor, they’re concerned that they’re doing something wrong and illegal. It’s notable in that story that they’re willing to do it. You know, a lot of people just feel desperate to access this health care.
Anna Staver:
Abortion medication is something that we’ve been hearing a lot about in recent weeks. you know, the majority of abortions are now performed via these medications, 63%, according to the Guttmacher Institute. The Supreme Court unanimously rejected a lawsuit that would have likely taken the drug off the market. But there is an asterix on that decision is that it didn’t actually protect access. It was a technical ruling about standing. So I have to imagine you and other providers are concerned that another lawsuit is going to come and actually make the substantive challenge.
Doctor Catherine Romanos:
Absolutely. I think that the people who oppose abortion have proved that their, beliefs will drive them to do just about anything to strip the, rights away from pregnant people. So it was explained to me that in the writings about this method, Presto, in case there was, there were hints given about how one might bring a similar case back, and not get caught up on that standing piece. Which concerns me a little bit about the impartiality of the justices on the Supreme Court. but yes, I’m concerned that the case will come back, and I’m concerned that it will just provide more confusion for my patients.
Anna Staver:
You know, one of the realities of the Dobbs world is that it’s very different from the one where Jane Roe couldn’t get an abortion. Abortion medication didn’t exist. Now it does. The internet exists. You can have telemedicine appointments. It’s a little sketchy, but there are people who have ordered abortion pills from online pharmacies. It is a totally different universe post Dobbs than it was before Roe.
Doctor Catherine Romanos:
Yeah. I’m so glad you brought that up because, I think for a long time people used the coat hanger as a symbol of an illegal abortion to prove that illegal abortions were unsafe. It’s a hard knot to untangle for a lot of health care providers that now there are some illegal abortions happening in states where abortion is not legal, and maybe in states where abortion is legal, that are safe. Right? If you can order abortion pills online, we actually have pretty good evidence — excellent evidence — that taking those pills on your own at home, with the support of a hotline or a doula or the internet, is a very safe option for you. It’s a bit of a twist to get people to see that illegal abortion is not necessarily unsafe now that we have pills.
Anna Staver:
Yeah. The state of Ohio, though, still bans telemedicine in abortion. It debated this issue of whether you could stop or reverse it by not taking the second pill as a doctor. That’s going to be so confusing to sit and listen to all these lawmakers talk science.
Doctor Catherine Romanos:
It was incredibly frustrating because there were some really bad studies that were done on abortion reversal. Laws were based on those few bad studies that were either, retracted or not endorsed by major medical associations. A really great study was done in California to prove that abortion reversal was not only not possible, but it was actually very dangerous. Even with that really good data, it’s been hard to convince state legislators that, abortion reversal is harmful.
Anna Staver:
There was a state lawmaker a couple of years ago who pontificated about the possibility of taking an ectopic pregnancy and transplanting it into the uterus, which is also not medically possible.
Doctor Catherine Romanos:
No. No, that’s not possible.
Anna Staver:
I’m sure a lot of women with atopic pregnancies might wish it were possible.
Doctor Catherine Romanos:
Yes. Yeah. We’re not there yet. Who knows? But no, that is not possible.
Anna Staver:
Do you ever have to combat any of that misinformation or confusion in your practice? Do you, to have people who ask these kinds of questions every day?
Doctor Catherine Romanos:
Yes. There’s a lot of misinformation, just out there. There is also a large network, crisis pregnancy centers who are targeting pregnant people with, the scariest misinformation they can find. So a lot of times when someone without a lot of resources finds themselves pregnant, they go to a crisis pregnancy center or one of these places you might see advertised that offers free pregnancy tests and ultrasounds. Once they’re there, they often are told a lot of really scary things.
So if I see a patient who’s been to a place for free ultrasound and pregnancy test, I’ll often ask, “Did they say anything to you that they scared you or that you wanted to ask or verify with me?”
Frequently they’ll say, “Well, they told me I would never be able to have children again. Is that true? They told me I’d get breast cancer. Is that true? They told me I had become suicidal. Is that true?” I say “No, no and no.” And we go through the list of things, that are not just misinformation floating around out there that are misinformation that are being, propagated very intentionally to pregnant people.
Anna Staver:
I’m going to ask you one final question, and it’s going to be somewhat political, so I apologize. But how important are the state Supreme Court races this November to the future of abortion access in Ohio?
Doctor Catherine Romanos:
I ask everyone I know to make sure they’re registered to vote, to please remember to vote. we encourage our patients to register to vote. a lot of the cases that we’re talking about in Ohio, will end up before the state supreme court, and our current state supreme court is very anti-choice. so that is an incredibly important election.
However, it doesn’t matter what happens at our state supreme court if we elect, Republican president and a Republican House and Senate that have promised us that a national abortion ban because a national abortion ban would trump anything that our state supreme court does or anything, that was passed in our constitutional amendment. So, yes, it’s important, but it’s not the only important thing this November.
Anna Staver:
This has been Doctor Catherine Romanos. Thank you for joining us today.
Doctor Catherine Romanos:
Thank you for having me.
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