‘Am I going to die?’: more women join challenge to Arkansas abortion ban

Original article by Susan Rinkunas

Leitaea Lowrimore had hallmark symptoms of a dangerous ectopic pregnancy in February: vaginal bleeding, sharp pain, low hormone levels and no visible embryo on a uterine ultrasound. The 28-year-old mother and former nursing assistant was stunned when an Arkansas emergency room doctor said he wanted to discharge her, as ectopic pregnancies – or when an embryo implants somewhere other than the uterine lining – are never viable and can be life-threatening.

She and her husband refused because they lived 45 minutes away in rural Oklahoma. The doctor agreed to admit her for monitoring, eventually saying that her pregnancy was probably ectopic, but if he treated her now, “he could do 10 years in prison”, Lowrimore said. This doctor was far from the only one to deny Lowrimore medical care: over the course of a week, a total of three emergency rooms in two states – Arkansas and Oklahoma, which also bans abortion – either denied her screenings or discharged her.

Lowrimore felt defeated and exhausted, thinking no one would help her. But at the urging of her husband, they got in the car with their one-year-old daughter and mother-in-law and drove three hours north to Wichita, Kansas, where a hospital finally gave her two injections of the drug methotrexate, the standard of care.

When her legs started to go numb during the drive, she turned to her husband and asked: “Am I going to die? Am I going to make it home?” She knows now, about two months later, that death was a real possibility. She’s terrified of what could happen if she gets pregnant again.

On Thursday, Lowrimore and one other woman who was denied an abortion joined an ongoing lawsuit that seeks to overturn Arkansas’s near-total ban. The suit argues that the law violates the state constitution’s guarantee that people have the right to life, liberty, equality and the pursuit of happiness.

The other new plaintiff, Kishaya Holloway, said she did not want to have children and left before dawn to travel to get an abortion out of state. The 31-year-old artist living in north-west Arkansas called abortion clinics in multiple states before getting an appointment in Kansas. She and her partner had to make the trip in a single day because they couldn’t afford staying overnight, even after getting financial assistance from the clinic and multiple abortion funds, including help to cover the cost of gas.

The case was filed by Amplify Legal, the litigation arm of Abortion in America, a reproductive rights group that shares stories of abortion patients and was co-founded by the late Cecile Richards, a former Planned Parenthood president.

“My autonomy was threatened. It felt like I was being forced to live in a way that I didn’t want to live,” Holloway said, who noted that she joined the lawsuit to protect other people in the state, including her younger sister.

The existing plaintiffs are an OB-GYN and four women who were denied abortions in Arkansas, three after their pregnancies had effectively ended and one who became pregnant from sexual assault. The ban doesn’t permit abortions in the cases of rape. Two of the women traveled to Illinois to get abortions, one was transported via ambulance to a Kansas hospital for labor induction and another was forced to continue her pregnancy and experienced a stillbirth. Lowrimore and Holloway were denied abortions just days after the original lawsuit was filed.

Dozens of women have said they were denied medically necessary abortions under state bans that proliferated after the supreme court overturned Roe v Wade. Many of those women joined lawsuits against states including Texas, Tennessee and Idaho, where lawmakers say their bans are supposed to allow people to get abortions in emergencies. Doctors and patients have found these exceptions unworkable in practice. Past cases involving patient plaintiffs sought to clarify exceptions in the bans, not to overturn the laws outright as this newest lawsuit is seeking.

Molly Duane, the litigation director of Amplify Legal, said her experience challenging medical exceptions to abortion bans since the Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision has shown that conservative-led states aren’t interested in compromise.

“There was a part of me at the beginning that thought: ‘Surely there are some [health] conditions we could all agree on,’” Duane said. “Frankly, they don’t care if their citizens suffer or even die.”

The organization is pursuing a different strategy of using state constitutional language on liberty to strike down abortion bans in their entirety. The promise of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness appears in the US Declaration of Independence, but not the US constitution. However, it’s codified in multiple state constitutions, including those of Arkansas, Kansas and Oklahoma.

Those protections mean a broader range of plaintiffs can sue the state. Duane said this was the first lawsuit since Dobbs that brings together plaintiffs who illustrate the ways that abortion bans harm people, including women who experience obstetrical emergencies, fatal fetal conditions, ectopic pregnancies, sexual assault and simply being pregnant against their will.

“It shows through very visceral and real individual stories of real people who have been harmed by these bans,” she said.

Lowrimore said she wanted to sue to help other women. Her story can “voice what’s truly going on behind closed doors and how the laws are affecting pregnant women,” she said.

The Kansas supreme court ruled in 2019 that the constitution’s liberty language protects the right to abortion. That ruling is why abortion is still legal in the state, which allowed three of Duane’s clients to get the care they needed there. Duane declined to comment about potential future litigation challenging Oklahoma’s abortion ban on liberty grounds.

Amplify Legal also filed a complaint with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) on behalf of Lowrimore arguing that, by failing to treat her ectopic pregnancy, three hospitals violated a federal law. The Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (Emtala) requires hospitals to stabilize patients experiencing medical emergencies, but the Trump administration has rejected the longstanding interpretation that hospitals must provide emergency abortions to protect patients’ health.

It’s not clear whether Trump’s CMS will side with her clients, but Duane said it was still important to put the health systems on notice.

“The hospitals that turned Leitaea away need to take a hard look at their policies,” Duane said. “No one’s hands are clean. Everyone who has the ability to protect patients needs to be doing absolutely everything that they can to do so, even when they feel their hands are tied behind their back.”