Two friends were denied care after Florida banned abortion. One almost died.
MIRAMAR, Fla. — Anya Cook did not want to push. But sitting on the toilet, legs splayed wide, she knew she didn’t have a choice.
She was about to deliver her baby alone in the bathroom of a hair salon. On this Thursday afternoon in mid-December, about five months before her due date, she knew the baby would not be born alive.
Cook tried to tune out the easy chatter outside, happy women with working wombs catching up with their hairdresser. At 36, she’d already experienced a long line of miscarriages, but none of the pregnancies had been more than five weeks along. Now she had to deliver a nearly 16-week fetus — a daughter she’d planned to call Bunny.
She took a deep breath and closed her eyes.
As soon as the fetus hit the water, blood started flowing between her thighs. Blood splattered on the white toilet seat and across the floor. She panicked, her hands shaking as she picked up her phone to call her husband, Derick.
“Baby,” she said, “I need you to come to the bathroom.”
Over the course of the day, according to medical records, Cook would lose roughly half the blood in her body.
She had intended to deliver the fetus in a hospital, a doctor by her side. When her water broke the night before — at least six weeks ahead of when a fetus could survive on its own — she drove straight to the emergency room, where she said the doctor explained that she was experiencing pre-viability preterm prelabor rupture of the membranes (PPROM), which occurs in less than 1 percent of pregnancies. The condition can cause significant complications, including infection and hemorrhage, that can threaten the health or life of the mother, according to multiple studies.
At the hospital in Coral Springs, Fla., Cook received antibiotics, records show. Then she was sent home to wait.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/04/10/pprom-florida-abortion-ban/