- Oct 17, 2011
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Callaway was actively miscarrying at her home in Austin, Texas, after being turned away by two hospital emergency rooms in a 72-hour period, according to a federal complaint filed last week. She spent her days curled up in bed in agonizing pain, experiencing chills, fever and an overwhelming amount of blood loss.
The treatment plan for early pregnancy loss in Texas, a state with one of the most extreme abortion bans in the country, is to send patients home and let the miscarriage run its course. Two of the hospitals Callaway visited discharged her using this “wait and see” method — an approach now used in many states with abortion bans in order to avoid offering a combination of certain abortion medications, the standard of care for early miscarriage.
But, like so many women denied miscarriage care since the fall of Roe v. Wade, Callaway developed an infection — leaving her at death’s door with no one to turn to for help.
Six days, multiple emergency room visits and repeated calls to her OB-GYN’s office later, Callaway was finally offered care to fully expel her pregnancy. Her OB-GYN prescribed her antibiotics for the infection and abortion medication to complete the miscarriage. When Callaway asked her OB why the ER doctors had not offered her the same medication, her OB responded that the ER would “have to be [durn] sure that it’s an actual miscarriage to be offering the pill,” the complaint states.
In her lawsuit, Callaway alleges that two hospitals violated the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act, also known as EMTALA. The federal law requires hospitals to offer abortion care if it’s necessary to stabilize the health of a pregnant patient while they’re experiencing a medical emergency.
One nurse at Baylor Scott & White told her she was being released from the hospital because her condition was “not necessarily limb or life threatening,” the complaint states. A physician at the same hospital subjected her to an invasive and painful pelvic exam for sexually transmitted diseases. (“I only ever see STD testing of pregnant women when they’re Black,” Duane noted.)
“There is a myth that miscarriage care, ectopic pregnancy care, care for severe cases of obstetrical complications, that that [care] is still happening and it’s just not,” said Molly Duane, Callaway’s attorney and the litigation director of Amplify Legal, a nonprofit legal organization.
Texas Attorney General [and senate candidate] Ken Paxton has, in many ways, led the fight against EMTALA, filing a lawsuit against the Biden administration in 2022 and claiming Texas shouldn’t have to comply with the federal law because of the state’s near-total abortion ban. Paxton accused the Biden administration of trying to “transform every emergency room in the country into a walk-in abortion clinic” by allowing emergency health care doctors to provide abortion and miscarriage care.
Callaway was actively miscarrying at her home in Austin, Texas, after being turned away by two hospital emergency rooms in a 72-hour period, according to a federal complaint filed last week. She spent her days curled up in bed in agonizing pain, experiencing chills, fever and an overwhelming amount of blood loss.
The treatment plan for early pregnancy loss in Texas, a state with one of the most extreme abortion bans in the country, is to send patients home and let the miscarriage run its course. Two of the hospitals Callaway visited discharged her using this “wait and see” method — an approach now used in many states with abortion bans in order to avoid offering a combination of certain abortion medications, the standard of care for early miscarriage.
But, like so many women denied miscarriage care since the fall of Roe v. Wade, Callaway developed an infection — leaving her at death’s door with no one to turn to for help.
Six days, multiple emergency room visits and repeated calls to her OB-GYN’s office later, Callaway was finally offered care to fully expel her pregnancy. Her OB-GYN prescribed her antibiotics for the infection and abortion medication to complete the miscarriage. When Callaway asked her OB why the ER doctors had not offered her the same medication, her OB responded that the ER would “have to be [durn] sure that it’s an actual miscarriage to be offering the pill,” the complaint states.
In her lawsuit, Callaway alleges that two hospitals violated the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act, also known as EMTALA. The federal law requires hospitals to offer abortion care if it’s necessary to stabilize the health of a pregnant patient while they’re experiencing a medical emergency.
One nurse at Baylor Scott & White told her she was being released from the hospital because her condition was “not necessarily limb or life threatening,” the complaint states. A physician at the same hospital subjected her to an invasive and painful pelvic exam for sexually transmitted diseases. (“I only ever see STD testing of pregnant women when they’re Black,” Duane noted.)
“There is a myth that miscarriage care, ectopic pregnancy care, care for severe cases of obstetrical complications, that that [care] is still happening and it’s just not,” said Molly Duane, Callaway’s attorney and the litigation director of Amplify Legal, a nonprofit legal organization.
Texas Attorney General [and senate candidate] Ken Paxton has, in many ways, led the fight against EMTALA, filing a lawsuit against the Biden administration in 2022 and claiming Texas shouldn’t have to comply with the federal law because of the state’s near-total abortion ban. Paxton accused the Biden administration of trying to “transform every emergency room in the country into a walk-in abortion clinic” by allowing emergency health care doctors to provide abortion and miscarriage care.
