Right to life only really applies to the zygotes, embryos and fetuses. No one else need apply “Right to life” zealots insist that pregnant patients must be bleeding out and literally on the verge of death before a doctor can provide life saving procedures: In Tennessee, Republican lawmakers are considering whether patients should be forced to continue dangerous pregnancies, even while miscarrying, under the state’s abortion ban — and how close to risking death such patients need to be before a doctor can legally intervene. At a legislative hearing last week, a lobbyist who played a dominant role in crafting the state’s abortion legislation made his preference clear: A pregnant patient should be in the process of an urgent emergency, such as bleeding out, before they can receive abortion care. Some pregnancy complications “work themselves out,” Will Brewer, who represents the local affiliate of the anti-abortion organization National Right to Life, told a majority-male panel of lawmakers Feb. 14. When faced with a patient’s high-risk condition, doctors should be required to “pause and wait this out and see how it goes.” Top Republicans like Gov. Bill Lee have defended the state’s abortion law, one of the strictest in the country, as providing “maximum protection possible for both mother and child.” But currently, the ban has no explicit exceptions, not even for the pregnant patient’s health. It only includes an “affirmative defense” for emergencies, a rare legal mechanism that means the burden is on the doctor to prove abortion care was…