Care Denial

Kristyn Fruit (2021) West Virginia

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In 2021, Kristyn Fruit (also known as Kristyn Smith) 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.”

After undergoing two surgeries to try to save her son’s life, she was advised by a midwife that the pregnancy was non-viable. Fruit made an appointment for an abortion in Washington D.C. but four days prior, 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, two years before lawmakers had passed the near-total abortion ban. The high-risk obstetrician at the hospital was the only one in the region, and was well-known for being vocally anti-abortion. He was Dr. Bryan Calhoun, former president of the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and an anti-choice extremist who believes abortion is never necessary to save the life of a pregnant person.

Although she was bleeding profusely and in extreme pain, Calhoun 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 Calhoun 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.” She said the medical advice was “scary” and contradicted her own providers’ directions.

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

“Looking back,” Fruit said, “my life was 100 percent in danger…. The fact that [Calhoun] got to choose when enough was enough is terrifying to me. How I was treated was medically unethical. Something has to be done, or laws need to be changed.”

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