Care Denial

Rachel Harrison (2025) – California

In September 2025, Rachel Harrison and her partner sued Dignity Health, a Catholic-affiliated hospital network, because she was denied emergency abortion care on two separate occasions. During the second episode, she developed a life-threatening blood infection.

Her first pregnancy loss occured at 17 weeks in September 2024. She felt a gush of fluid and rushed to Mercy San Juan Medical Center, a Catholic-affiliated hospital owned by Dignity Health. There, she was told by a physician assistant that her water had broken, and the baby was unlikely to survive. But the medical team refused to do a dilation and evacuation to remove the tissue because fetal heart tones were detected. They advised Harrison to go home and miscarry without medical intervention, and to return only if her symptoms worsened. Marcell Johnson, her longtime partner, said he was struck by the instructions they were given: pass the fetus and dispose of it at home. “That was really hard for me to deal with and comprehend. I was really angry and frustrated. I couldn’t imagine someone (saying) go home and flush your baby down the toilet, essentially,” he said. At the urging of family members, Harrison later went to a Kaiser hospital and received appropriate care for her condition: Previable preterm premature rupture of membranes, or previable PPROM (the term for when a pregnant person’s water breaks before the fetus would survive on its own). The standard of care for PPROM is abortion because of the high risk of infection.

Then In March of 2025, again at 17 weeks gestation, Harrison felt her water break and went to the emergency room at Mercy General Hospital in Sacramento, another Catholic-affiliated hospital. (She had to stay within the hospital network to have her medical care covered by insurance.) Harrison and Johnson were told once again that their fetus still had a heartbeat and there was nothing the hospital could do because of its Catholic affiliation. The couple was not told that Harrison once again had symptoms consistent with PPROM. Harrison went to the nearest Kaiser hospital where she was offered an abortion or a transfer to a labor & delivery unit where she could be stabilized and monitored until 22 weeks. She chose the latter because she clung to the hope that her baby would survive. But by the time she arrived at the hospital in an ambulance, the baby no longer had a heartbeat. Doctors helped her pass the pregnancy but part of the placenta remaind, and during a procedure to remove it, she experienced postpartum hemorrhage and lost significant amounts of blood. She also experienced an infection around her placenta that developed into sepsis and required that she be placed on intravenous antibiotics. Harrison underwent a blood transfusion and stayed at the hospital for three days until she was stable enough to return home.

The couple fell into a deep depression after each miscarriage. They sought counseling and became unable to work due to emotional — and in Harrison’s case, physical — stress. “While waiting to learn if I would lose my child, my own life, or both, I felt deep pain and despair. I was traumatized,” Harrison said. “There is simply no way to justify the inhumane actions of Dignity Health.”

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