These pregnant women say they were denied medical care. They’re suing Arkansas

Emily Waldorf left Arkansas at 10:30 p.m. Lying in the back of the ambulance, she couldn’t shake the feeling that she was doing something wrong. 

She dozed in and out of sleep on a stretcher. A paramedic watched over her while knitting a blue baby blanket. After nearly four hours, Waldorf, then 17-weeks pregnant, woke up to the bumps on State Line Road at 2 a.m. She had finally made it across the border to Kansas City.

She was transferred into a hospital room and remembers women with surgical bonnets and green scrubs walking in. She recalls they said: "We’ve been waiting on you. We’re so glad you made it."

“It just felt like, ‘Oh my God. You’re going to help me,’” Waldorf says. “It felt very much like crossing over a freedom line.” 

Five days prior, Waldorf had been diagnosed with cervical insufficiency and the preterm premature rupture of membranes “PPROM,” which is when the amniotic sac ("water") breaks before 37 weeks of pregnancy. The risk of disease, sepsis or death increases significantly in women with PPROM. She was told she would miscarry soon.

But under Arkansas’s near-total abortion ban, which went into effect after the U.S. Supreme Courts’ Dobbs decision in 2022, Waldorf says she was left in limbo at her local hospital. In Arkansas, any intervention to end a pregnancy legally counts as an abortion, according to the state register. Abortion is only permitted if necessary to “preserve the life” of a patient in the event of a medical emergency. Her doctors were unable to intervene unless she was at imminent risk of death or until her unborn baby’s heartbeat stopped, though she was passing “blood clots the size of tennis balls."

“I just kept on being told, 'You’re not sick enough,'” she says. “The more time that went by, the more scared I started to get.”

The maternal mortality rate is increasing in the United States, and there's evidence that abortion bans have been associated with increases in maternal deaths during or within one year of pregnancy, according to a new study published in the American Journal of Public Health. Arkansas has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the nation.

Waldorf’s sister called the office of Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders to step in but reached a standstill. So, she sought out legal representation. She then tried to arrange a medevac helicopter – quoted at $25,000 – so the family settled on a $5,000 “non-emergent” ambulance transfer out of state.

Waldorf, along with five other patients and one physician, are now seeking to strike down Arkansas’s abortion ban in its entirety. In January, Amplify Legal – the litigation arm of Abortion in America − filed the lawsuit, Waldorf v. Arkansas. The plaintiffs argue the near-total abortion ban denies patients life-saving medical care and their rights of “enjoying and defending life and liberty” under the state’s constitution, among other claims. 

“Governor Sanders looks forward to defending Arkansas’s pro-life laws in court,” Sam Dubke, director of communications for the Office of Gov. Sanders, said in a statement to USA TODAY. 

In addition to her strong pro-life stance on abortion, Sanders has overseen expanded spending on maternal health, youth services and foster care placement. Americans United for Life, an advocacy group, factors programs like these into its ranking of states based on laws that "protect life from conception to natural death."

"Arkansas was named the most pro-life state in the country for the sixth year in a row," Dubke wrote.

'I don't want anyone else to have to go through that'

Like Waldorf, Theresa Van was excited to give her child a sibling and never thought of herself as someone who would seek an abortion. She dreamed of growing her family and hoped to eventually have four children. But when she received the devastating news at 20 weeks that her unborn child would not survive outside the womb, she had to wait for her unborn daughter’s heartbeat to stop and continue carrying a nonviable pregnancy. Her doctor told her that if he were to intervene, he could face a $100,000 fine and 10-year prison sentence. 

“I wasn’t registering what was going on. … I was really distraught about losing my daughter,” she says. This was her third pregnancy, and she had already suffered a miscarriage in her second pregnancy because of a car accident.

At 25 weeks, her placenta had moved to cover her cervix, which put her at a high risk of hemorrhage and a dangerous delivery. That’s when she began telling her friends – she didn’t want anyone to ask her how her pregnancy was going, not knowing the grief she was already facing. 

When her unborn baby’s heartbeat stopped at 27 weeks, her doctors said her hemorrhage risk was too high for her to deliver at her local hospital, so she had to travel three hours to a hospital in Little Rock, Arkansas, with more robust staffing and a larger blood bank. Her daughter, whom she named Cielle, was stillborn. The grieving process since has “been a rollercoaster,” she says. 

Van has joined Waldorf's lawsuit against the state.

"I do not believe that anyone should have to be on the brink of death to receive compassionate medical care," she says. “I love my community, and what I went through was really traumatic and I don't want anyone else to have to go through that.”

Doctors, patients left confused and stuck

Some of Waldorf’s friends struggled to believe that Arkansas' abortion ban was what blocked her care. Even in the hospital, in her state of pain, confusion and preemptive grief, Waldorf couldn’t understand it either. She says she wasn’t asking for an elective abortion, just for treatment. 

“Nobody knows that [in] a medical emergency, you need an abortion sometimes,” Waldorf says. After hearing her story, a lot of her pro-life friends changed their outlook on abortion laws. 

Van’s community was also shocked, but largely supportive. She had been part of a group that protested Roe v. Wade’s overturning in 2022, but still hadn’t understood the scope of the near-total abortion ban until it affected her. 

In addition to other claims, the lawsuit filed in January argues that Arkansas’ constitutional guarantee of “life, liberty and the pursuit of their own happiness” should cover a pregnant person’s right to avoid needless suffering, disability or death when a pregnancy goes wrong.

"It felt very isolating," Waldorf says. "I felt like I was a liability more than I was a patient. I felt just very alone and abandoned by our medical system ... but coming out of it ... I noticed I was abandoned by my state, not just the medical team."

Molly Duane, the litigation director of Amplify Legal, says the ambiguity in what constitutes a medical emergency is what makes doctors fearful to take action.

Arkansas’ law spares patients from criminal prosecution, but the doctor who performs the abortion can go to prison. This is the case in most states with abortion bans, but lawmakers in at least 10 states proposed bills in 2025 that would allow authorities to charge with homicide people who obtain abortions, according to the Center for Reproductive Rights. As of 2026, none of those laws have passed.

Dr. Chad B. Taylor, the OB-GYN involved in Amplify Legal's lawsuit, has been "constrained in the kinds of pregnancies he can terminate" because of the "vagueness of Arkansas's abortion bans," often at increased risk to the patient, according to the legal complaint reviewed by USA TODAY.

In one case, he observed the hospital's cardiac team discuss with a pregnant patient "how high the risk of death would [need to] be to meet the medical emergency exception." Thirty percent? Ten percent? They weren't certain. In another case, a patient diagnosed with breast cancer learned she was pregnant when she went to have a port placed for chemotherapy. Her medical team paused treatment while they tried to determine if it was legal to treat the cancer while she was pregnant, which would likely cause a miscarriage. She died before she could receive treatment.

"You don't want your doctor thinking, 'Is this illegal, what I'm about to do, which is the right thing for my patient?'" Duane says. "That's the situation we're in."

Since the filing of the lawsuit, two more patients have joined the case. One was denied an abortion for an ectopic pregnancy, and the other was seeking an elective abortion. 

"What happened to me is not a rare thing," Van says. "It could literally happen to your mom, your sister, your friend. Anyone."