She Needed an Emergency Abortion. Doctors in Idaho Put Her on a Plane.

In states that have banned abortion, hospitals have struggled to treat pregnant women facing health risks. A Supreme Court decision this week did not help.



When she began hemorrhaging, Nicole Miller was taken by plane to Utah. Only when she woke up the next morning did she understand, because a nurse told her, that she was airlifted so she could have an abortion. Natalie Behring for The New York Times

By Kate Zernike
Kate Zernike writes about abortion and politics.
Published June 28, 2024
Updated June 29, 2024, 4:56 a.m. ET

Nicole Miller had gone to the emergency room in Boise, Idaho, after waking up with heavy bleeding in her 20th week of pregnancy. By afternoon, she was still leaking amniotic fluid and hemorrhaging and, now in a panic, struggling to understand why the doctor was telling her that she needed to leave the state to be treated.

“If I need saving, you’re not going to help me?” she recalls asking. She remembers his answer vividly: “He told me he wasn’t willing to risk his 20-year career.”

Instead, that evening, hospital workers at St. Luke’s Boise Medical Center put Ms. Miller on a small plane to Utah, where she said she gripped her husband’s hand — scared of flying but more terrified that she would never see her young daughters again. “I just need to stay alive so I can be around for my two other kids,” nurses reported her saying as she arrived at the hospital in Salt Lake City, 14 hours after she had arrived in the emergency room back home.

Only when she woke up the next morning did she understand, because a nurse told her, that she was airlifted so she could have an abortion.

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