Woman With Cancerous Pregnancy Told to Wait Until She Was ‘Crashing’
‘SO ALONE’
“‘We cannot touch you unless you are crashing in front of us or your blood pressure goes so high that you are fixing to have a heart attack,’” the woman said she was told.
A 25-year-old woman in Central Oklahoma learned she would need an emergency abortion for her nonviable, possibly cancerous pregnancy—but was reportedly turned away from several medical facilities, with the staff at one hospital instructing her to wait in the parking lot for her condition to worsen before they could treat her. “They were very sincere; they weren’t trying to be mean,” Jaci Statton, a mother of three, told NPR. “They said, ‘The best we can tell you to do is sit in the parking lot, and if anything else happens, we will be ready to help you. But we cannot touch you unless you are crashing in front of us or your blood pressure goes so high that you are fixing to have a heart attack.’” She and her husband ultimately drove three hours to get to a facility in Kansas that would help her, Statton said. “I felt so alone,” she told The Oklahoman. Late last month, after Statton was denied care in Oklahoma, the state Supreme Court offered a limited clarification on when a patient can be provided a life-saving abortion.
