California woman sues Catholic hospital chain over emergency abortion denial

Yahoo

02-04-2025

A Eureka woman who nearly bled to death while miscarrying twins last year is suing the Catholic hospital chain that she claims refused her life-saving abortion care.
Anna Nusslock, a chiropractor who sued Providence St. Joseph Hospital Eureka and its parent companies in Humbolt Superior Court on Tuesday, said she hopes the action will force the company's California hospitals to follow state law.
"The work that we're doing is going to protect people today and it's going to help people survive," she said. "I'm hoping to hold the whole Providence healthcare system accountable."
The hospital says it already complies with the law.
"The experience described in this lawsuit is deeply saddening and troubling," a spokesperson for Providence South Division wrote in a statement. "We are fully committed to delivering care in accordance with federal and state law, as well as our mission as a faith-based organization. This includes providing emergency life-saving medical interventions that may result in indirect fetal death."
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The suit builds on a September action filed by California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta, accusing the hospital of violating the state's emergency services law.
"There is an existing injunction in the attorney general's case, but it's only against the hospital and it is limited just to while the litigation is pending," said K.M. Bell, senior litigation counsel for reproductive rights and health at the National Women's Law Center, which brought the lawsuit with Nusslock.
Tuesday's suit seeks to make the injunction permanent and binding for all St. Joseph hospitals in California.
"I've been really surprised at how healing the process has been," Nusslock said. "We need to be putting pressure on these hospitals."
Nusslock and her husband had been trying for years for a baby when she got pregnant with twins in late 2023. After her water broke late last February, just 15 weeks into her pregnancy, she rushed to the emergency room fearing the worst.
Yet, despite clear signs Nusslock's life was in peril and her twins could not survive, the ER's attending physician told her she was not "sufficiently close to death," to receive emergency abortion care, according to court papers.
"I remember saying to somebody, 'But this is California!'" Nusslock recalled. "But it's a technicality when the only hospital you can have a baby at won't help you."
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On the advice of the St. Joseph emergency room doctor, a hemorrhaging Nusslock drove herself 12 miles to Mad River Community Hospital where both twins were delivered dead, one spontaneously and the second via an abortion procedure.
"'If you try to drive [to UCSF], you will hemorrhage and die before you get to a place that can help you,'" the St. Joseph doctor told her, according to the suit.
In December, after Mad River closed its labor and delivery department, another woman sued the Eureka hospital, alleging she was denied similar care during three separate miscarriages.
In the first incident described in her claim, she traveled five and a half hours to San Francisco "in active labor" for help. The second time, she required two units of blood to recover from a preventable hemorrhage. In the third, she alleges she was left to deliver her dead baby into a hospital toilet.
The woman now suffers from post-traumatic stress, anxiety and depression "from being denied care at the only major hospital—and now the only labor & delivery unit—in her county," the suit said.
"Because Plaintiff desperately wants to have a baby, Providence St. Joseph is certainly the hospital where she will go for her next delivery," the suit said.
The hospital has denied wrongdoing in court filings.
As American hospitals consolidate, an ever-growing number are now run by Catholic groups. According to the Catholic Hospital Association of the United States, one in seven patients in the U.S. receives care at one of their facilities. More than 15% of American babies are born in Catholic hospital delivery rooms.
After the Supreme Court's ruling in Dobbs vs. Jackson Women's Health Organization overturned the right to abortion in the 2022, about two dozen states restricted or outlawed the procedure, about half of them with narrow exceptions for life or death cases.
But Catholic hospitals in many abortion-protective states such as California also deny terminations in cases such as Nusslock's.
"These refusals of care unfortunately are not new," Bell said. "But the situation is more dire now post-Dobbs."
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Although St. Joseph's agreed last fall to provide emergency abortion care, the hospital has since reversed course, seeking to have the state DOJ suit dismissed on the grounds that compliance infringes on its 1st Amendment right to religious freedom.
"SJH could not comply with such an order without forsaking its Catholic identity—the ultimate burden in a religious freedom case," the motion said.
Bonta said the hospital was flouting the law.
"The stakes of this could not be clearer: having acknowledged that they have, and will continue to, violate a law which requires them to adequately care for patients experiencing life threatening medical emergencies, SJH now asks this Court to condone their conduct by dismissing this action,' the state wrote in opposition to the motion.
The court is set to rule on the issue May 15.
In the meantime, Nusslock said the hospital's actions have stiffened her resolve.
"It felt cruel and it continues to feel cruel," Nusslock said. "You're placing this religious policy over my actual life."
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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.