Women Share Their Abortion Ban Horror Stories After Project 2025 Adviser Smugly Says They’re Fake

John McEntee, who served in the Trump administration and helped write Project 2025, said in a viral TikTok that women aren’t “bleeding out” from abortion bans. Women like Idaho’s Carmen Broesder shared their stories in response.

By Kylie Cheung | September 17, 2024 | 1:26pm

Photo: Screenshots Politics Abortion

Women Share Their Abortion Ban Horror Stories After Project 2025 Adviser Smugly Says They’re Fake

During last week’s presidential debate, Kamala Harris confronted former President Trump about the consequences of his abortion bans: “Pregnant women who want to carry a pregnancy to term, suffering from a miscarriage, being denied care in an emergency room because the health care providers are afraid they might go to jail, and she is bleeding out in a car in the parking lot—she didn’t want that,” Harris said, in response to Trump’s lie that most people supported Roe v. Wade being overturned. Harris was referring specifically to the story of Jaci Statton, a young Oklahoma woman who suffered from a molar pregnancy that resulted in cancerous tissue, but was instructed to wait in a hospital parking lot for her condition to worsen before doctors would provide an emergency abortion.

John McEntee, a former Trump administration official and current Project 2025 staffer, then took it upon himself to post a now-viral TikTok suggesting Harris made all of this up. “Can someone track down the women Kamala Harris says are bleeding out in parking lots because Roe v. Wade was overturned? Don’t hold your breath,” McEntee says in the clip, posted to the TikTok account for “The Right Stuff,” his right-wing dating app. That’s right: In addition to working on Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s agenda for a second Trump administration to bypass Congress and enact a national abortion ban (among other terrifying, far-right policies), McEntee is perhaps most famous for launching a dating app from hell made exclusively for right-wingers.

Most Popular

Since McEntee posted his TikTok on Thursday, dozens of women have taken him up on his challenge, starting with Carmen Broesder, an Idaho woman who documented her 19-day miscarriage on TikTok in December 2022, expressing fear that she would die before any hospital helped her. In 2023, after one rural Idaho hospital shuttered its entire labor and delivery department as a consequence of the state’s criminal abortion ban, Broesder told Jezebel about her experience: “A doctor told me ‘don’t come back until your pain or bleeding is worse,’ like I’m dying.”

Speaking to Jezebel again on Monday, Broesder said McEntee isn’t the first person to try to minimize or cast doubt on her traumatic experience: “It’s disheartening and felt like a slap in the face. I had done so much work to get my story out there and they always say ‘fake news,’ no matter the evidence I bring, including my book with photo evidence.” This skepticism—that abortion bans aren’t truly harming women—reminds me of how, in 2018, about 60% of voters said they didn’t think it likely the Supreme Court would really kill Roe. Broesder added, “It’s tough to constantly face disbelief, especially from those in power or who have platforms to influence others.” After Broesder went to a second hospital in 2022, she says a doctor “looked at me with pity and said ‘there’s confusion, trepidation regarding the abortion law,’” but he couldn’t act to save her life yet.

Naturally, Broesder took McEntee’s TikTok personally, and stitched his video with her response: “I blacked out in my hallway due to blood loss,” she says in the video. “I developed a heart condition called AFib. It means my heart doesn’t work right anymore, and it fucks up. So, if I get too excited, too hot, too much in pain, too traumatized, if somebody yells at me too much, my heart fucks up. So, I have to regulate for my heart to keep active, otherwise, I could have a heart attack and die. I have to deal with these side effects for the rest of my life because of abortion laws. … But yeah, women are bleeding out in parking lots. I actually have a pinned video of me saying they’re going to just let me fucking bleed out here. … Yeah, we exist.”

@geekynerdbitchcarmen #stitch with @Date Right Stuff ♬ original sound – Date Right Stuff

Idaho is one of nearly two dozen states with total or near-total abortion bans, all of which theoretically allow exceptions to save the pregnant person’s life. But as numerous medical experts and lawsuits point out, these exceptions don’t work in practice because they don’t define what constitutes a threat to the pregnant person’s life, nor do they factor the time-sensitive, urgent nature of pregnancy-related complications, which require immediate action, not legal deliberation. On Monday, ProPublica published a report about the first maternal death confirmed by a state maternal mortality committee to be the “preventable” result of an abortion ban.

As of Tuesday, Broesder’s TikTok has six million views and over 34,000 comments, including many from women sharing similar horror stories. She said the response has been “overwhelming and reinforcing,” but expressed concern “that many feel dismissed and erased in their own experiences.”

“My SIL [sister-in-law] had this happen to her in TX as well,” one comment says. Texas’ total abortion ban threatens doctors with life in prison if they violate it.

“I almost died in Cincinnati Ohio with an ectopic they wouldn’t treat me for. I wasn’t treated until 9wks3 days. I bled out for 78 days. My hemoglobin was dangerously low,” another TikTok user wrote in Broesder’s comment section. Others had similar experiences with ectopic pregnancies: “I was told when I had a possible ectopic pregnancy that I would have to ‘wait until it made me septic’ to get the surgery to save my life,” one commenter said. An ectopic pregnancy is a nonviable, life-threatening condition that occurs when a fertilized egg develops outside the uterine wall, often in the fallopian tubes, and is incompatible with life.

“My daughter. Nearly lost her life after she miscarried triplets that didn’t expel her body & 3 hospitals wouldn’t remove them,” another comment reads.

“I’ve been anemic on and off since my weeks-long miscarriage,” wrote another. “Three hospitals refused to give me a DNC or pill protocol. Unimaginable pain and distress.” One user shared that her “miscarriage took an entire month to complete because the hospital would not remove anything even though the fetus was nonviable.” And another user, who “[lives] in a state where [abortion is] legal,” said she bled for 21 days but her hospital still “kept sending me home until I nearly bled to death.”

As of Tuesday, McEntee’ Tiktok has 2.2 million views and over 22,000 comments. McEntee and the Right Stuff didn’t respond to a request for comment on whether they’ve seen Broesder’s—or anyone’s—response. After all, these stories are everywhere: Just last month, the Associated Press reported on over 100 cases of pregnant people turned away from emergency rooms since 2022, when Roe fell—including, in Florida, a woman left to bleed out and lose half her blood on the floor of a hair salon because of the state’s abortion ban.

Since Broesder posted her now-viral TikTok answering McEntee’s call to “track down” women like her, Broesder says she hasn’t heard from him, and she doesn’t expect to. “The erasure of my experience—and the experiences of so many women—feels like an attack on our basic humanity,” she said.