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WV woman travels six hours for life-saving abortion; calls for abortion access to be placed on voter ballot
SAINT ALBANS, WV (WVNS) — A woman has called for West Virginia voters to decide the issue of abortion access in the state after she was forced to check herself out of a Charleston hospital in 2021 and travel six hours for a life-saving abortion.
'The only decision in this sensitive situation should be in the hands of voters. They're the ones going through it,' said Kristyn Fruit, 33, on Thursday, June 12, 2025. 'They're the ones that matter.'
In the case of a voter ballot, West Virginia voters and not elected officials would decide situations in which abortion is legal in West Virginia.
In 2023, West Virginia lawmakers passed a near-total abortion ban in the state.
Fruit said that she grew up attending pro-life rallies with her mother, protesting against legal abortion.
In 2021, she said she was a mother of three following three uneventful pregnancies when she learned she was pregnant for the fourth time.
'It was a boy, and we named him Kase, and at my 20-week ultrasound, I found out he had a rare abnormality,' she said. 'He couldn't make amniotic fluid. All of his urine was backed up into his kidneys and his bladder.'
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Fruit said doctors diagnosed Kase with fetal lower urinary tract obstruction (LUTO), which left him unable to produce the amniotic fluid necessary for healthy fetal development.
Fruit traveled to Cincinnati, Ohio, she said, and underwent two highly invasive surgeries to try to save her son's life.
She said she had planned a third surgery when a midwife told her Kase would not be able to survive, and that Fruit was not a viable candidate for the third surgery.
The midwife recommended she terminate the pregnancy, Fruit said, adding that she agreed it was the best choice for Kase.
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'I just did not want him to suffer,' Fruit explained. 'I did not want him to be born to suffocate and die.'
In 2021, prior to West Virginia lawmakers' ban on abortion, elective abortion was legal in West Virginia up to 20 weeks.
Fruit made an appointment for an abortion in Washington D.C. as quickly as possible, she said, and concentrated on being present for her three children, despite being in physical and emotional pain.
'Four days before that appointment, I started having complications with my health,' said Fruit. 'I was putting up Halloween decorations, and I started having gushes of blood.'
Fruit said she later learned that her placenta had started to slowly detach from her uterine wall, as a result of the second surgery she'd undergone to save her pregnancy.
She said she ended up at a West Virginia hospital, two years before lawmakers had passed the near-total abortion ban.
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She said the high-risk obstetrician at the hospital was the only one in the region, and claims he was well-known for being vocally anti-abortion.
She said she was bleeding profusely and was in extreme pain, but that the OB-GYN told her he did not want to perform an abortion, despite the diagnosis by Fruit's medical care team regarding Kase's chance of survival. Instead, Fruit stated, the doctor informed her that he wanted her to continue the pregnancy until she'd lost more blood and that he would perform a C-section, a surgery Fruit said she'd never experienced.
'He wanted me to wait to the point of my bleeding getting to the rate of 'a fountain of blood,'' Fruit quoted. 'Those were his exact words. I wasn't close enough to death for the 'life of the mother' exception to apply to me.'
Fruit said the medical advice was 'scary' and contradicted her own providers' directions. Against the advice of staff nurses, she said, she was forced to check herself out of the hospital and to travel six hours to Washington D.C.
Medical staff in Washington D.C. performed a life-saving pregnancy termination, she said, and the doctors also confirmed her own providers' diagnosis that Kase also would not have survived a delivery.
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Medical staff in D.C. provided Fruit with ink prints of Kase's hands and feet.
In Fruit's medical records, the 27-week abortion she received in Washington D.C. was recorded as 'elective,' meaning it was performed by the patient's choice, even though she was experiencing a slow placental abruption, she said.
Fruit said she has since welcomed a fourth child, although she had been reluctant to get pregnant in West Virginia because of lawmakers' 2023 abortion ban.
She called on Thursday for a reproductive rights amendment to appear on the voter ballot in the state, giving West Virginians the right to decide on legal abortion.
Pointing to her experience at the West Virginia hospital, Fruit said the narrow exceptions in the state's abortion ban to protect the pregnant patient's health and life could actually delay or deny care for women, particularly when politics- such as a ban- play a role in health care decisions.
'Nothing was good enough for him until I got to the point of hemorrhaging,' she said of the obstetrician who had denied her abortion in 2021.
Fruit has also shared her story on podcasts and in national publications.
Fruit made the call for the voter referendum shortly after the Trump Administration rescinded federal guidance that hospitals provide emergency abortions in state hospitals.
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