ArcaMax

“This is not theoretical,” Uranga said. “This is actually happening.”

So far this year, she has treated two patients with previable preterm rupture of membranes. One was the patient who delivered while traveling to Portland. The other didn’t want to leave the state for an abortion procedure.

Uranga said the patient “really believed they would be fine. I don’t know what happened to her, but I think about her a lot.”

Several doctors detailed the cases they’ve seen in a document compiled by Physicians for Human Rights. The organization submitted that document, with the doctors’ accounts anonymized, along with an amicus brief — an outside testimony meant to add context and illustrate the legal impact of a court case — to the Supreme Court.

In it, one doctor in Oregon recounted treating an Idaho patient with a history of kidney disease who had a type of preeclampsia called HELLP syndrome, which includes low platelets and elevated liver enzyme levels and can lead to hemorrhage. The recommended treatment is immediate delivery of a pregnancy, or, if the pregnancy is not yet viable, abortion.

The woman, who was 18 weeks pregnant with twins, had spent years on dialysis and had a donor kidney. Her emergent condition put her at high risk of kidney failure. The physician who cared for the patient after she was transferred out of Idaho told Physicians for Human Rights that Idaho doctors didn’t feel they could do an abortion, even though one of the patient’s fetuses died while she was still at an Idaho hospital.

Instead, she was transferred to Oregon, where the second fetus died before doctors could terminate the pregnancy.

“She was young and the whole thing was incredibly traumatic for her,” the Oregon doctor said in the document. “After we removed the two dead fetuses, she had to stay with us for a while. After all this, we had to coordinate transport back afterwards, after she had not gotten appropriate treatment for a long time and was in a terrible state.”

In its own amicus brief, St. Luke’s Hospital System told the Supreme Court that patients who are forced to continue their pregnancies “will suffer — potentially gravely.” It said conditions that call for termination can cause extreme pain and health complications, including liver hemorrhage, kidney failure, stroke, seizures, pulmonary edema and more.

The Physicians for Human Rights brief included several other stories of obstetric emergencies in Idaho, from more cases of previable preterm rupture of membranes to a refugee patient with a history of sexual assault who was too traumatized to push when she was in preterm labor.

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