Woman files lawsuit against Kansas hospital for allegedly refusing emergency abortion

A Missouri woman is filing a lawsuit against a Kansas hospital where she claims she was refused an urgent abortion when she experienced premature labor at 18 weeks of pregnancy, alleging she was denied immediate health-stabilizing treatment.

The legal action comes a year after a government examination by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services found that hospitals in Missouri and Kansas breached federal law by declining to offer Mylissa Farmer with abortion care.

Farmer is now taking legal action against the University of Kansas Health System and the hospital authority that oversees it under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA), which mandates immediate stabilizing care for all patients in hospitals funded by Medicare.

In the lawsuit, Farmer claimed that she experienced preterm premature rupture of membranes in August 2022 and had lost all her amniotic fluid by the time she arrived at the Kansas Hospital. She asserts that she had been directed to the hospital after being denied care at a Missouri hospital due to the state’s abortion prohibition.

Without intervention, she faced the risk of severe blood loss, sepsis, infertility, and death, according to the lawsuit.

Physicians at the hospital allegedly “declined to conduct even basic emergency assessments such as checking Ms. Farmer’s temperature and evaluating her pain,” as per the lawsuit.

Despite being informed of the dangers she faced without an urgent abortion, physicians at the hospital still rejected her without offering any care, Farmer claimed.

Two days later, Farmer received abortion care in Illinois, but her prolonged miscarriage “resulted in extensive harm to her health,” according to the lawsuit.