When a fetal scan showed problems, she fled Idaho for an abortion – now she’s suing

When Jillaine St.Michel’s chatty ultrasound technician suddenly got quiet, St.Michel didn’t initially think too much of it.

The 37-year-old Idaho mother’s second pregnancy had been smooth. She had been feeling so great that she hadn’t felt the need to bring her husband along to her 20-week scan in late November of last year, a few weeks after they publicly announced the pregnancy.

But as the scan went on, St.Michel, who is a chiropractor, started to suspect that her fetus’s arms looked a little off. The technician left the room, promising to return with the office’s fetal medicine specialist.

Then St.Michel waited. And waited. She took a look at the fetus’s vitals, still displayed on the screen, and many of the measurements were below 1%. St.Michel started to get worried.

Around 20 minutes later, the fetal medicine specialist walked in, along with someone else. The specialist introduced herself, and then told St.Michel that her colleague was a genetic counselor.

That’s when St.Michel knew something was very, very wrong.

The providers recommended that St.Michel call her husband to come to the appointment. After he arrived, they delivered the news: the couple’s fetus had multiple severe genetic and developmental conditions affecting multiple organ systems. If the fetus survived to birth, the baby would immediately need palliative care.

St.Michel could consult more specialists, continue the pregnancy – a decision that, she later learned, could threaten her health – or get an abortion. But she could not get the abortion in the state; the procedure is banned in almost all circumstances in Idaho.

“Basically, all they could do was hand us a sheet of paper with abortion clinics in nearby states,” St.Michel told the Guardian in an interview, as she started to cry.

St.Michel is one of four women who, on Tuesday, sued Idaho in an attempt to clarify the state’s abortion ban and allow doctors to perform abortions in cases like hers. Two doctors and the Idaho Academy of Family Physicians have joined the lawsuit, which was brought on the plaintiffs’ behalf by the Center for Reproductive Rights.

“Idaho’s abortion bans have sown confusion, fear, and chaos among the medical community, resulting in grave harms to pregnant patients whose health and safety hang in the balance across the state,” the lawsuit alleges. “While Idaho’s abortion bans purport to contain ‘medical exceptions,’ these so-called exceptions simply do not function as such in practice.”

Since the overturning of Roe v Wade allowed abortion bans across the country to take effect, doctors in Idaho and other states have said that the bans’ so-called “medical exceptions” are worded in opaque, non-medical language that they find impossible to interpret. These exceptions, they say, have forced them to merely watch until patients get sick enough that doctors can legally help.

Lawyers for the Center for Reproductive Rights also filed legal actions on Tuesday in Tennessee and Oklahoma, which have enacted near-total abortion bans, demanding specificity on how abortions should be handled in medical emergencies. The center has previously sued over the issue in Texas; a judge in that case ruled in favor of the women denied care, but that decision has been paused while the case makes its way to the Texas supreme court.

Idaho has one of the most “extreme” abortion bans in the country, Marc Hearron, the center’s senior counsel, said on a press call on Tuesday. While some states allow abortions when people’s health may be at risk, Idaho does not. Under its near-total ban, abortions can only be performed when someone’s life is threatened.

Doctors have started to flee Idaho in droves, and the state could soon find itself a pregnancy care desert. At least 13 reproductive health specialists and four fetal medicine specialists have stopped practicing in Idaho, Dr Emily Corrigan, one of the Idaho doctors involved in the lawsuit, wrote in a June article for the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. Two rural labor and delivery units have also closed.

“Our medical community here in Idaho is experiencing catastrophic loss that is going to take decades to fix – once we get these laws improved. We’re still in a terrible downward spiral right now,” Corrigan told reporters on Tuesday. “I have hope that the legislature will improve the law. That’s why I’m still here. But I have to ask myself every single day if it’s worth it to stay here.”

After she got the news about the fetus, St.Michel called out of work for the rest of the week, she told the Guardian. She supports abortion rights, but hadn’t thought she would ever need an abortion.

Still, she decided she wanted one.

“At that point, I was feeling baby movement, fetal movement,” St.Michel said. “It was really difficult to think of continuing on and trying to pretend like normal life was happening for us.”

St.Michel and her husband managed to secure an appointment in late December at an abortion clinic in Seattle, Washington, she said. She and her husband brought their toddler daughter with them.

While the providers at the clinic were kind, St.Michel felt like she had been forced to suffer alone – her husband couldn’t come inside, and her care team was back in Idaho. During the appointment, she clutched a grainy ultrasound photo of her fetus, she recalled. It is the only photo she has.

Among booking flights, a hotel room and a rental car, and the two-day procedure itself, St.Michel estimates that she and her husband spent between $3,500 and $4,000 ending her pregnancy.

“I’m so, so grateful to them, to the clinic and how much compassion they showed me. But it still wasn’t fair,” she said: “That I had to be in that room by myself grieving for the loss of a pregnancy that we wanted so badly.”

Once they returned to Idaho, St.Michel told many people only that her family had experienced “a loss”.

But months later, she no longer feels like she should keep what happened a secret.

“It wasn’t a shameful thing that we did,” she said. “It almost feels liberating to share the truth, to share our experience, because I do want people to know how these laws are affecting women across the country.”

St.Michel with her husband and child. Photograph: Courtesy of Jillaine StMichel

After the abortion, St.Michel and her husband debated whether to try for another baby. St.Michel did get pregnant again, and is due in January 2024, but the experience of being pregnant again is nerve-racking.

“What if something happens again? What if I’m put in this situation again?” she wondered. “What if this time is worse and my life is at more imminent danger? Where does that leave us?”

St.Michel and her husband have weighed leaving the state. They love living in Idaho, but she can’t ignore the burgeoning political climate in the Republican-dominated state. She wants to give her daughter “a more compassionate upbringing” and she’s not sure if life in Idaho can provide that.

St.Michel wears a diamond necklace every day, because diamond is the birthstone for April – which would have been her due date. St.Michel’s daughter is too young to understand what happened, she said, but she sometimes picks up the necklace and asks about the fetus that would have been her sibling.

“Hopefully, when she’s of age to comprehend some of this, things will be different here. Hopefully, this little case will be a thing of the past and I’ll be able to say, ‘Because of what happened, we were able to make changes for the better in this state,’” St.Michel said of her daughter. “I hope someday she’s proud of me for that.”