Care Denial

Kristyn Fruit (2021) – West Virginia

Woman forced to travel for six hours for life-saving abortion

In 2021, Kristyn Fruit became pregnant with her fourth child, a boy she planned to name Kase. Her 20-week ultrasound fond a rare abnormality. “He couldn’t make amniotic fluid. All of his urine was backed up into his kidneys and his bladder.” The baby was diagnosed 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 planned a third surgery when a midwife told her Kase would not be able to survive, and that she wasn’t a viable candidate for the third surgery. The midwife recommended she terminate the pregnancy and Fruit agreed it was the best choice.
“I just did not want him to suffer. 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., but four days before the appointment, started having “gushes of blood.” 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 ended up at a West Virginia hospital, where the high-risk obstetrician was the only one in the region and was well-known for being vocally anti-abortion. She was bleeding profusely and in extreme pain, but the OB-GYN would not perform an abortion, despite the prior diagnosis that Kase would not survive. Instead, the doctor said she should continue the pregnancy until she’d lost more blood and that he would perform a C-section. Fruit said the medical advice was “scary” and contradicted her own providers’ directions. “He wanted me to wait to the point of my bleeding getting to the rate of ‘a fountain of blood’. Those were his exact words. I wasn’t close enough to death for the ‘life of the mother’ exception to apply to me.”

Against the advice of staff nurses, she was forced to check herself out of the hospital and travel six hours to Washington D.C., where medical staff performed a life-saving pregnancy termination. The doctors also confirmed her own providers’ diagnosis that Kase also would not have survived a delivery.

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