When Sarah was 24, she was a newly single mother of two small children, including one with significant special health needs. Days before Mother’s Day and just a few months after escaping her abusive partner, she doubled over in pain and had to be hospitalized. Within hours, she found out she was at risk of sudden death.
Sarah was unknowingly near the end of her first trimester, but instead of the embryo developing in her uterus, it was developing at the end of her fallopian tube. She had an ectopic pregnancy and her tube was about to rupture.
She needed an immediate abortion. Without one, her doctor said the tube would burst and she would bleed to death.
“I was shocked,” she told CBS News. “…But, you know, if I had not been able to get that, I would have died and my children would have been left with an abusive father who, on top of that, did not know how to take care of those multiple special needs. I have no idea what would have happened to my kids if I died.”
Sarah is one of many who have experienced such pregnancies, and whose life was saved by an abortion procedure.
But the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 landmark case that protected the right to an abortion, has created an area of grave unknowns when it comes to medical emergencies such as Sarah’s.
“In my years of being an OB-GYN, I’ve seen things that I didn’t know were medically possible complicate pregnancies,” Dr. Amy Addante told CBS News. “…There’s a lot of other extremes of pathology that can definitely require that a person not be pregnant any more so that they can preserve their own health.”
