Woman Brought Dinner-Plate-Sized Blood Clot to Hospital & Was Still Denied Abortion

Over the summer, 34-year-old Avery Davis Bell and her husband, who live in Georgia, were excited to learn they were pregnant with their second child. But by early October, things took a turn for the worse: After weeks of bleeding and numerous emergency trips to the hospital, Bell was diagnosed with a subchorionic hematoma, which causes bleeding between the uterine wall and amniotic sac. The condition can clear up on its own—but that didn’t happen for Bell. By the 18th week of her pregnancy, her water broke and she needed an emergency abortion to prevent life-threatening infection. Instead, her doctors told her that due to Georgia’s six-week abortion ban, they couldn’t do anything yet. CNN first reported Bell’s story on Monday.

Under Georgia’s ban, which has been active since 2022, providing abortion services is a felony punishable with prison time. The law offers an exception if the pregnant person’s life is at risk, but it’s so vague that doctors delay time-sensitive care in order to evaluate their legal risk. These delays can be deadly, as we saw in the cases of Georgia women Amber Thurman and Candi Miller, or cause long-term health consequences.

Early in October, Bell went to Emory University Hospital in Atlanta three times in two weeks. At one point, she passed a blood clot the size of a dinner plate, scooped it out of the toilet in her home, and brought it to the hospital to show her doctors. On Bell’s third visit, she learned she was miscarrying and needed an emergency abortion, but says her doctor “was telling me ‘because we’re in Georgia, we can’t move immediately to the surgery.’” Even though Bell was at risk of developing a life-threatening sepsis infection, doctors determined she wasn’t at imminent risk of dying, and would instead wait for her health to get worse.

“We couldn’t just move from emergency to done. We just had to sit in limbo. My fetus is dying, and I am stable this second that I’m thinking this, but in 10 minutes I may not be, and that’s just a time no one should have to extend, that limbo,” Bell told CNN. In addition to the state’s six-week ban, Bell learned she also had to adhere to Georgia’s 24-hour waiting period for abortion services and review and sign medical consent forms written by anti-abortion lawmakers. The forms included “garbage language about heartbeat and fetal pain and stuff that’s clearly put in for legislation reasons rather than scientific reasons,” she said. 

“My doctor had over a decade of post-college education to be able to navigate those situations, and yet the law hamstrung her,” Bell continued. “It makes doctors jump through hoops written by elderly men who have no medical knowledge and have an ideological position inconsistent with how biology works.”

Later that day, on October 17, additional tests revealed that levels of oxygen-carrying hemoglobin in Bell’s blood had plummeted and reached a dangerous low. Doctors determined that her life was at risk enough for them to bypass the state’s 24-hour waiting period and invoke the ban’s medical emergency exception. Bell said she’s thankful to have ultimately received care, but she believes she should have received it immediately—and she would have received it immediately had she lived in a state that didn’t ban abortion. Until 2020, Bell lived in Boston, where she and her husband previously studied and received their degrees. They moved to Georgia to be closer to Bell’s family.

In a statement shared with CNN, Emory University Hospital says that “in compliance with Georgia’s abortion laws, our top priorities continue to be safety and well-being of the patients we serve, no matter where patients or doctors live.” Bell said she blames state laws instead of her doctors for how she was treated.

Meanwhile, Georgia continues to have one of the worst maternal mortality rates in the nation. In September, ProPublica reported on the deaths of two Georgia women, which the state maternal mortality committee confirmed were caused by the state’s ban. One woman, Amber Thurman, was forced to wait 40 hours for an emergency abortion, causing her to develop sepsis and die. Another woman, Candi Miller, feared she would face criminal charges if she went to the emergency room after experiencing complications from a medication abortion. Within days, Miller died from a sepsis infection.

At the end of September, a county court blocked the state’s abortion ban; the judge wrote, “Women are not some piece of collectively owned community property the disposition of which is decided by majority vote.” But a week later, the Georgia Supreme Court reinstated the ban as the court prepares to hear arguments for the case in the near future. The court listened to the state’s argument that patients “will not suffer much harm” if the ban remains in effect pending a ruling in the case. An attorney for the Center for Reproductive Rights called the court’s decision to reinstate the ban “a death sentence for some.”