She Needed an Emergency Abortion. Doctors in Idaho Put Her on a Plane.
The New York Times
In states that have banned abortion, hospitals have struggled to treat pregnant women facing health risks. A Supreme Court decision this week did not help.
Nicole Miller had gone to the emergency room in Boise, Idaho, after waking up with heavy bleeding in her 20th week of pregnancy. By afternoon, she was still leaking amniotic fluid and hemorrhaging and, now in a panic, struggling to understand why the doctor was telling her that she needed to leave the state to be treated.
“If I need saving, you’re not going to help me?” she recalls asking. She remembers his answer vividly: “He told me he wasn’t willing to risk his 20-year career.”
Instead, that evening, hospital workers at St. Luke’s Boise Medical Center put Ms. Miller on a small plane to Utah, where she said she gripped her husband’s hand — scared of flying but more terrified that she would never see her young daughters again. “I just need to stay alive so I can be around for my two other kids,” nurses reported her saying as she arrived at the hospital in Salt Lake City, 14 hours after she had arrived in the emergency room back home.
Only when she woke up the next morning did she understand, because a nurse told her, that she was airlifted so she could have an abortion.
“I couldn’t comprehend: I’m standing in front of doctors who know exactly what to do and how to help and they’re refusing to do it,” Ms. Miller said in an interview, her first since going through the ordeal last fall.
On Thursday, the United States Supreme Court declined to decide whether states that ban abortions, like Idaho, must comply with a federal law that requires emergency room doctors to provide abortions necessary to protect the health of a pregnant woman.
