I had a friend of a friend be forced to take (and pay for! Thanks America!) A pregnancy test when she had to go to the ER, despite her telling them she physically couldn't get pregnant because she is trans, I swear in some cases it's like they just don't listen to patients at all ðŸ˜
This is crazy to me. I'm cisfem in the UK, and everytime I go to our version of ER, regardless of why I'm there, they ask if I might be pregnant. I say no. They accept my answer and move on.
And, I have to stress, our system is really not great at the moment. Yet, the idea of a doctor being like 'Im afraid Im gonna need you to prove that before we move on' would utterly blow my mind.
The difference is that in the UK, if you lied/were wrong about not being pregnant, you'd live with the consequences. In the US, you'd sue everybody for said consequences of your own actions.
In some states it's not just the patient that might sue them, they might face criminal charges or getting sued by literally anybody in texas for violating abortion bans
Yeah to confirm the other comment. In the US if you said "No" and a doctor performed a test or procedure that killed a fetus then they could be massively sued, and there is a solid chance that they would lose their license and never be able to work in medicine again.
Haha, your neighbours in the Emerald Isle here. Our patients are sue happy over here, using American standards when they're funded by the Irish system, not over here they don't. Unless it's in the medical chart that they had an operation to remove a uterus, I'm doing a pregnancy test on a patient. A doctor here asked a patient if they were sexually active, they said no because "I'm too young in my culture to have sex"... BOOM pregnant. There are also reasons why they won't admit their history, such as a parent or guardian being present when being asked those, we do a pregnancy test anyway. We are lied to all the time or it may not be a good time that a patient tells us their medical history, but things like a pregnancy test is a blanket test for child bearing women here, unless it's medically stated you don't do one.
That's really interesting. Based on some of the answers from US peeps about how it likely stems from their different cultural/legal attitudes to abortion/foetal harm for them, do you think that either the tendency to lie or the tendency for doctors to be more worried about lying stems from Irelands history with the same issue?
Yeah, not for everything, but if you present as female with symptoms like abdominal pain you are getting a pregnancy test in the UK. Just like in most places in Europe.
My most recent trip was abdominal issues actually! They accepted the answer 'not if the coil that's in there is doing it's job' that time. I can imagine if there was obviously a risk I'm wrong based on some special circumstances or me behaving erratically they wouldn't accept my answer, but them otherwise not trusting me would be a hell of a pattern break. I was in there a lot in my 20s >_>
This is soothing to hear. I’ve heard of this pregnancy-test-debacle many times and was afraid of it. But now it sounds like maybe that’s just an American thing.
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u/mysocksareinsideout MakeshiftEmery Jul 31 '26
I had a friend of a friend be forced to take (and pay for! Thanks America!) A pregnancy test when she had to go to the ER, despite her telling them she physically couldn't get pregnant because she is trans, I swear in some cases it's like they just don't listen to patients at all ðŸ˜