By Imani Davenport
EUREKA, CA – California Attorney General Rob Banta has announced the AG Office is prosecuting the company that manages the hospital accused of denying a woman her state right to an abortion.
The AG said that “the hospital violated a California law” which requires institutions to “provide care to prevent not only death, but ‘serious injury or illness.”
The New York Times reports that in February of 2024, Providence St. Joseph Hospital, in Eureka, CA, refused medical service for a woman who arrived at its emergency room for immediate assistance.
Despite residing in California, a state known for “some of the strongest abortion rights protections” as noted by the New York Times, the woman was refused an emergency abortion at a Catholic hospital.
The hospital’s justification for this denial was that “fetal heart tones could still be detected,” added the Times, meaning “the institution’s policy prohibited providing abortion unless Dr. Nusslock’s life was at risk, according to her medical records.”
Doctors who handled the situation understood that should the pregnancy continue to term, the woman could face “infection, hemorrhaging and threats to her future fertility,” wrote the Times.
The NY Times’ Pam Belluck reports the woman’s husband drove her “to the next closest hospital, where she arrived hemorrhaging and passing a blood clot the size of an apple.” The woman expelled one fetus.
Considering the rather liberal policies in California, the event that conspired was in direct opposition to what is presumed to occur in the majorly left state, wrote the Times, adding the woman thought she “would be safe here from things like this.”
Belluck, health and science reporter for the New York Times, quoted AG Bonta, who said these cases “can happen ‘even in California, a place that is very strongly pro-choice.’”
