Warning: This story contains details of a miscarriage which some people may find distressing.
“We broke Roe vs Wade“, president-elect Donald Trump said earlier this year, referring to the Supreme Court ruling in 2022 which stripped millions of American women of the legal right to abortion.
Some 36 days later, Ryan Hamilton, a radio host from Texas, found his wife passed out “in a huge pool of blood” on their toilet floor, their dead baby still inside her after she was denied abortion care.
“What I want is for people to understand that this is really happening and that abortion bans affect incomplete miscarriages, women like my wife,” Mr Hamilton told Sky News.
“Women have literally died and the thing I want the most is to make sure that my daughter’s future doesn’t include her bleeding out on a bathroom floor like her mum almost did.”
‘She was tortured for four days by the state of Texas’
In 2021 Texas introduced stringent laws on abortion, banning it after five weeks of pregnancy.
But after Roe vs Wade was overturned the next year, it went a step further and banned abortion in any circumstance except to save a woman’s life or prevent “substantial impairment of a major bodily function”.
Although Texas allows this exception, doctors and women argued in court last year that the state’s law is so restrictive and vaguely worded that physicians are afraid of providing abortions for fear they could face potential criminal charges.
Mr Hamilton claims the law’s vagueness is what caused his wife to almost die from her miscarriage.
“There’s no clarification as to how close to dead a woman has to be for them to legally perform the abortion care that she needs,” he said.
With his first daughter, a one-year-old, cooing in the background, Mr Hamilton described how his wife, 37, was 13 weeks pregnant when she miscarried while carrying their second child.
When they first realised something was wrong, the couple went to a medical centre near their home in a rural area of Texas, where the baby was found to have no heartbeat.
Mr Hamilton’s wife, who has asked to remain anonymous, was prescribed the drug misoprostol, more commonly known as an abortion pill.
That was a Thursday, Mr Hamilton recalls, but as it was too late in the day to get hold of the pill, his wife had to spend a “torturous” night with their dead baby still in her womb.
When morning came, Mr Hamilton went to the pharmacy and got the pill. But after his wife took the first dose, the couple called the medical centre to report something was “really wrong” as she was bleeding a lot.
They asked for an alternative to the pill but the medic on the phone said they should try again with the second dose and monitor the colour of the blood.
Mr Hamilton said: “They asked me what colour the blood was, they said it needs to be brown blood… I said ‘it’s bright red’ and they said ‘that’s not right’.
“So in the middle of losing our baby… We are being instructed on focusing on the colour of the blood in the toilet.”
After a night when Mr Hamilton’s wife experienced something akin to early labour, the situation hadn’t changed, so the couple went back to the centre in the hope of getting more support.
The doctor on shift, however, told them that “considering the current stance” he wouldn’t prescribe any more misoprostol – and also had no alternative to offer.
“We stood in the parking lot with our then nine-month-old daughter in the truck, trying to figure out what we were going to do because the risk of sepsis could have killed my wife… if we left our dead baby in there,” Mr Hamilton said.
They then decided to go to another hospital about an hour away. His wife was subjected to “more probing and prodding only to discover what we already knew, that our baby didn’t have a heartbeat”.
She was “bleeding profusely at this point”, he said, “bleeding non-stop, bleeding through post-birth pads”.
Mr Hamilton said the doctors “disappeared for hours” only to come back and refuse to carry out dilation and curettage (D&C), a surgical procedure to remove the baby. The couple were sent home with a third dose of misoprostol instead.
Mr Hamilton said they were essentially saying “she’s not close enough to dead to perform this procedure as she has to reach the life of the mother exception under Texas law”.
“It’s nightmare stuff and my poor wife was tortured for four days by the state of Texas,” he said.
Sky News has approached Texas state authorities for comment.
According to online abortion service Women on Web, medical abortion is “effective and safe” up to 12 weeks of pregnancy. After that, the medicine will still be effective but the risk of complications increases, as does the chance of having to see a medical professional afterwards.
‘I thought she was going to die’
Mr Hamilton described how after taking the third dose of the abortion pill, his wife woke up on Sunday to even more bleeding.
“I wrapped her in the heating blanket, and she was cold, clammy cold. I propped her head up on the pillow and it was the first time I thought she was going to die.”
While checking on their daughter, he got a missed call from his wife, so he ran over and found she had “fallen off the toilet” and was lying in a “huge pool of blood”.
He picked her up and “put her unconscious body in the truck”, strapped their daughter in and drove to a third hospital in the hope of getting help.
As “she was close enough to dead”, she got life-saving care, regained consciousness and her body gradually recovered.
According to analysis shared with NBC, the number of women who died while pregnant, during labour or soon after giving birth skyrocketed following Texas’ five-week ban in 2021.
From 2019 to 2022, the rate of maternal mortality cases in Texas rose by 56%, compared with just 11% nationwide during the same time period, according to an analysis of federal public health data by the Gender Equity Policy Institute.
“We will carry that torturous experience with us for the rest of our lives,” Mr Hamilton said.
What could happen to abortion rights under second Trump administration?
It is hard to say what Trump’s second administration, due to start once he is inaugurated on 20 January, could mean for the future of abortion rights in the US as the president-elect has flip-flopped on the issue.
As president, he backed a House bill which would’ve banned abortion in the whole country after 20 weeks.
In March, he suggested he would support a nationwide ban on abortions after 15 weeks’ gestation.
But in the final stages of his latest campaign, which saw his Republican Party take control of both Houses, the 78-year-old said he would not sign a federal ban on abortion and would leave it to the states to decide what policies to adopt.
At the end of August, Mr Trump, whose wife Melania recently published a memoir where she came out in support of abortion rights, told Sky News’ US partner network NBC he believed the six-week abortion ban adopted by his home state of Florida was “too short”.
Read more:
‘My baby lived for just 93 minutes’
US Supreme Court preserves women’s access to abortion pill
But as he faced fierce backlash from anti-abortion advocates, Mr Trump came out a day later to say he would be voting “no” on an unsuccessful ballot measure which would have expanded abortion access until foetal viability, around the 24th week of pregnancy.
Nancy Northup, CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights, said his re-election is a “deadly threat” to reproductive health.
She said that as a result of Roe vs Wade being overturned, abortion is nearly or completely banned in 17 of the 50 US states.
As the results of the presidential election became clear, there were reports of Americans stockpiling abortion pills, while Plan C, which promotes access to abortion medication online, said searches to its homepage following the landslide vote for Mr Trump surged from 500 to 80,000 in a day.
Ms Northup said: “The unnecessary and cruel harm caused by the first Trump administration includes a reproductive health care crisis in vast swaths of the United States that has led to the deaths of numerous women who are likely the tip of the iceberg.
“A second Trump administration will compound these harms with new, potentially far worse ones.
“It will seek to stop the availability of medication abortion by mail, which has been a lifeline in post-Roe America,” she said.
There are also fears it will try to gag organisations based both in and outside of the US from advocating for abortion rights and providing care abroad, even with their non-US funds.
“Without Trump overturning Roe vs Wade then none of this starts to happen,” Mr Hamilton said, referring to the women who died or, like his wife, narrowly escaped death as a result of complications from being denied the care they needed.
“The priority is not my wife’s health, the priority becomes the legality of the procedure.”
At the heart of anti-abortionists’ campaigning is the belief in the sanctity of human life.
“In opposing abortion, we acknowledge the humanity of the child in the womb which fuels our effort to protect the pre-born child’s life,” Americans United for Life says.
Mr Trump’s campaign team has been approached for comment.
