In late January, four women and a physician in Arkansas sued the state over its near-total abortion ban. Matthew Moore reports.
Emily Waldorf was excited to grow her family. She and her husband had one daughter, and in 2023, they found out they were pregnant again. But when they went in for the 8-week appointment, she says it was quickly bad news — there was no cardiac activity on the first ultrasound.
"So we had experienced a miscarriage and I had to have a D&C after that."
What Waldorf did not realize at the time is that a D&C — dilation and curettage — is an abortion procedure. She says she had never considered that an abortion was something a person could need.
"So to me, I have always thought that abortions were by choice, not by emergency medical health care."
In July 2024, Waldorf became pregnant again. She says there was a mix of strong emotions, joy for another pregnancy, anxiety about another early miscarriage, and concern about being a pregnant woman in her mid-30s. She says her obstetrician was kind, let her come in for more checkups than normal during that first trimester.
"And for me, just thinking about that miscarriage that I had, everything just seemed so fine until I saw that there was no heartbeat. And so I would say that I was pretty nervous about that."
Moore: Anatomy scan usually happens at about 20 weeks. You don't even make it to that point.
Waldorf: No.
Moore: Give me a little bit of a timeline of when did things really start to feel like they might be going off the tracks.
Waldorf: I felt totally normal other than anxiety. Just fear. We already had our anatomy ultrasound scheduled and I went to work out. I was working out pretty consistently. I work out a lot. And I remember getting home that morning feeling fine, getting in the shower, taking a bump picture that morning. And I still have it in my phone and it's really hard to look at that picture because at that point in time, everything was fine. And I just remember making coffee that morning and feeling like blood was running down my leg.
Waldorf was 17 weeks pregnant when she went to Washington Regional Medical Center in Fayetteville, which was also where she worked. She says initially, they turned her away because she wasn't far enough along yet to be seen by labor and delivery, but because she knew her way around the hospital, she knew where to go and what she needed to say.
"And I said, I'm having an obstetric emergency right now. I'm bleeding and I feel like something might be coming out of my cervix. I could just feel that something wasn't right."
Turns out she was right. Her OB diagnosed her with cervical insufficiency and that she was already dilated 2 centimeters. Her medical team considered a few options, but the odds of saving the baby and saving her life together were low.
"There is a high likelihood that you're going to become septic, and you're going to have an infection, and that infection would actually be the baby, and we would have to do a hysterectomy on you. And so I thought, well, that doesn't sound good either. Nothing sounded good. And I just remember him saying, we don't have a crystal ball, but you're going to lose this pregnancy, you're going to miscarry, and it's going to happen quick."
But it didn't happen quickly. Waldorf spent days in the hospital waiting for something to change.
Moore: At what point do you start to make the realization that some sort of medical intervention, some sort of abortion intervention was necessary, and you had to figure out what that looked like here.
Waldorf: I would say that, again, my knowledge on abortion was so limited at the time. I thought the whole time I was there that I was just asking for them to induce me, and I didn't realize I was asking for a medically induced abortion. And so I remember asking for antibiotics and I thought, this has been three, four days. And y'all keep on telling me the longer I'm pregnant, the more likely I will get sick. Will you guys give me some prophylactic antibiotics or anything? They said no. That puts us in a gray area. But I did have one doctor say to me the second day I was there, because I remember saying something like, this is really unfair. I just don't really understand what's going on. And I remember her saying, “Tell your friends to vote differently.” And I was like, what does that have to do with anything? What does that have to do with abortion? Or what does that have to do with me being here?
On Waldorf's fourth day in the hospital, her water broke.
"And whenever the doctor came to examine me and she said, I need to go speak with risk management about what our next steps are — that's whenever it really dawned on me."
She says that two hours later, they came back to her and told her she had two options.
"I could either stay there and continue to be observed, or I could go to Kansas. And whenever I ask, would you guys transfer me to Kansas? She says, no, you and your husband have to get in a private vehicle and drive there. And I said, well, would you help us find where to go? No. And I remember her walking towards the door and I said, this is really unfair. And she just turned around and she said, I agree. And she walked out."
Waldorf is an alumna of Ouachita Baptist University, the alma mater of Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders as well. She says, in the midst of all of this, her sister came up with the idea to just try and call the governor's office. So that's what happens. Her sister Elizabeth calls her office.
“And he was like, well, let me call you back. So he called her back. They talked on the phone for like 20 minutes, and he wasn't really giving us any options. And my sister said something like, I don't think you understand the severity of the timing of where we are, because at that point in time, it had been 24 hours since my water had broke. And he said, well, we can't help you. We advise that you seek legal advice. And then she said, what does that mean? And he said, get an attorney."
Emily has another person, a friend named Jamison, who lives in Connecticut, who also calls the governor's office.
"Can you clarify the law for the general counsel at the hospital, or can you guys give my friend an exception so that she can be transferred to Kansas? And they basically said no."
Ozarks at Large reached out to Gov. Sanders' office multiple times to ask them for an interview and for comment on these accounts. None of our emails were returned.
Waldorf eventually connects with Molly Duane, who is an attorney with Amplify Legal and helps her take a private ambulance 240 miles from Fayetteville to Kansas City to receive abortion care and save Waldorf's life. After several hours of labor, Waldorf gave birth to her second daughter, who died shortly after.
Moore: Did you have a name picked out?
Waldorf: We named her Bee — like a bumblebee — so that we could be reminded of her in nature. A friend had told us a story about another friend who had lost a baby in the second trimester, and my husband came up with the name because we didn't really want to give her a name that we would hear that name all the time and be put off by it or whatever. And so now it's like every time I see a bee in nature, I'm reminded of her.
During the 2023 legislative session, Rep. Nicole Clowney presented a bill that could have prevented this from happening. House Bill 1301 was called An Act to Amend the Arkansas Human Life Protection Act and the Arkansas Unborn Child Protection Act to Exclude an Abortion in the Case of a Fetal Abnormality Incompatible with Life.
Clowney presented her bill to the House Public Health, Welfare and Labor Committee on March 7, 2023 — about 18 months before Waldorf's experience.
"Under current Arkansas law, women who have gotten the devastating news that their babies won't survive outside the womb — in other words, women who are suffering more than most of us can ever imagine — are forced to suffer even more. Many of you are parents on this committee, and you likely remember your 20-week scans, the one where you get to see your baby up on the big screen, where you get that really deep, thorough look at the baby's anatomy. The one where you typically find out if you're expecting a boy or a girl.
“In Arkansas today, a mother could find out at that 20-week screen that she won't be leaving the hospital with her baby because her baby developed without critical anatomy and therefore cannot live after birth. Previously, one option that her doctor would have given her in that scenario would have been to induce labor and deliver her baby early. But now that early delivery counts as an abortion under Arkansas law."
Clowney's bill did not make it out of committee. She had invited medical experts to join her during the committee meeting, including Shannon Barringer, a genetic counselor with the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. Ozarks at Large reached out to UAMS to request an interview with Barringer for our reporting. UAMS declined our request.
Phil Connors is the lead genetic counselor at Boston University Medical Group and a director-at-large on the board of the National Society of Genetic Counselors. He says both of those words in the title — genetic and counselor — are key to the role, that being trained in the science of genetics and also being a counselor to explain the impacts of genetic testing that was conducted are critical.
"It's really what makes our profession quite unique — being able to integrate what that medical information and really intensely detailed scientific information means for an individual in a family."
Connors says it's important to remember that pregnancy is more than just an incredible and exciting time for many people.
"But it's also a medical condition or a medical state, and every pregnancy poses a health risk. And that health risk can lead up to as much as even death. So this is a very serious thing that I think patients are considering when they're deciding whether to have a family, start a family, continue to grow a family."
And in that same vein, Connors says his colleagues consider the term abortion an apolitical medical term.
"And it defines both a pregnancy that stopped on its own or was stopped by some sort of medical means. So we are in health care incredibly comfortable with this terminology. It is just the term for pregnancy loss. And there are qualifiers, descriptors of what kind of pregnancy loss it was, but it's a medical term. Apart from any politics, abortion is a health care act, a health care procedure, a health care state. And I certainly understand that abortion, the word itself means a lot of different things to different people. And I'm not surprised that that means that politically it's a charged conversation. It's my personal practice to use the word abortion instead of other euphemisms with patients, so that I hope to not contribute to the sort of stigmatization of something that we know is a routine part of obstetric and gynecologic health care."
Moore: Why is it important for you to use the term?
Connors: I think like anything — any word that has sort of had different meaning to different people and entered the political discourse — I think it's important to sort of reclaim that word when it's possible, for what we know to be a very reasonable health care decision for a patient to choose.
Moore: Do you have hopes of getting pregnant again?
Waldorf: I do, but I'm also horrified of what, number one, having another loss. I wasn't allowed to grieve my loss this last time because I was being traumatized and having to suffer during a loss. Everything, all the suffering that I went through was totally preventable. So that to me is really hard to come around from a traumatic perspective or from a trauma perspective. Thinking about the what-ifs. But of course, I would love to grow our family.
Waldorf says when she thinks about her participation in this lawsuit, she thinks of her daughter.
"I remember whenever I first got home and I would look at her and I would think, I'm going to be someone that makes the choices for her. I'm going to speak up about this because I want her future. Her future is what matters. What I do affects her future. And I want her to look at me and think, my mom did everything she could for me. And whether that was surviving a life-or-death situation, I did that for her. I just didn't want to die. I didn't want to leave my daughter without a mom."
Moore: If you had an opportunity to talk to Gov. Sanders today, right now, what would you say to her? What would you want her to know about you personally, about your experience?
Waldorf: I would want her to know that my life matters also. And if we are the most pro-life state in the nation, we need to be pro-life about everyone that's involved. And I am upset that my state valued my suffering over my safety. Her being a mother also, I can't imagine her making a different decision.
Moore: If she had been in your place?
Waldorf: Yeah. I mean, I don't know how anybody could have made a different decision when you're told you're going to deliver or die. You have to make a choice.
No trial date has been set at this time. A spokesperson for Attorney General Tim Griffin declined an interview with Ozarks at Large but says the case on its face appears to have little legal merit.
Ozarks at Large transcripts are created on a rush deadline and edited for length and clarity. Copy editors utilize AI tools to review work. KUAF does not publish content created by AI. Please reach out to kuafinfo@uark.edu to report an issue. The audio version is the authoritative record of KUAF programming.
