In principle, that is true. But that is simply not the reality on the ground. States ban abortion with such exceedingly narrow exceptions that doctors and hospitals delay until the point of actively endangering women.

Four deaths, reported on by one outlet, in the past couple months:

- A Texas teenager died after going to three emergency rooms and being misdiagnosed and denied treatment: https://www.propublica.org/article/nevaeh-crain-death-texas-...

- Another Texas woman died after a miscarriage as a result of doctors not treating her due to the state's fetal heartbeat law: https://www.propublica.org/article/josseli-barnica-death-mis...

- A Georgia woman with chronic health conditions, which can make pregnancy highly risky but did not exempt her from Georgia's abortion ban, died of complications from a medication abortion: https://www.propublica.org/article/candi-miller-abortion-ban...

- Another Georgia woman died because doctors delayed 20 hours after she arrived at a hospital—9 hours after she was diagnosed with sepsis—before treating her: https://www.propublica.org/article/georgia-abortion-ban-ambe...

> right now there is nowhere in the country where if a pregnant woman’s life is threatened by her pregnancy then she cannot legally obtain a medical abortion.

This literally happened very recently

https://www.propublica.org/article/nevaeh-crain-death-texas-...

From that very article:

> Texas’s abortion ban threatens prison time for interventions that end a fetal heartbeat, whether the pregnancy is wanted or not. It includes exceptions for life-threatening conditions …

And from the actual text of the law (https://www.capitol.state.tx.us/tlodocs/87R/billtext/pdf/HB0...), abortion is permitted when ‘in the exercise of reasonable medical judgment, the pregnant female on whom the abortion is performed, induced, or attempted has a life-threatening physical condition aggravated by, caused by, or arising from a pregnancy that places the female at risk of death or poses a serious risk of substantial impairment of a major bodily function unless the abortion is performed or induced.’ That is a very broad exception.

The doctors had to be so certain that it was life threatening before acting that once they decided it was life-threatening, she was already going to die no matter what they did. And this is not an isolated incident.

The law has to allow for more uncertainty for the carve-out to be effective.

This might blow your mind, but for a condition to truly be life treating some people will probably die even if they have treatment, otherwise by definition it would not be a life threatening condition.

For example doctors have to wait for sepsis to actually occur before treatment, thus some will die because they loose to the infection

Unfortunately as a practical and legal matter that is false. First, physician incentives are aligned to deny care: they have a defense for denying care ("my lawyer isn't clear that I have authority to do this") and the woman has no recourse. Second, there is a simple matter of skill and availability. Fewer facilities allow abortion; fewer OB/GYNs are skilled at doing it safely. In my pregnancy I wanted a perfectly reasonable and legal thing supported by medical evidence and was unable to find a doctor in the state to provide it (vaginal breech birth as opposed to forced C-section).

When you are pregnant, and particularly if you are experiencing complications, you do not have time to shop around and convince people and schedule in advance and all that. You are constrained by the spatiotemporal availability of a skilled medical professional.