Amy Klobuchar was kicked out of the hospital 24 hours after giving birth. Outrage fueled her rise. [View all]

[RandySF]

Amy Klobuchar was exhausted, exhilarated, shaken by a dizzying mindstorm of joy and pain. She’d been in labor for 18 hours, hadn’t slept in two nights, and now she’d given birth to Abigail and life was everything it could ever be. The baby “had all her fingers and toes and seemed quite healthy, except for some mucus in her throat,” Klobuchar recalled.

The new mother called her parents, filled out forms and finally dozed off.

Before long, someone woke her up: “Suddenly the nurse comes in and says ‘She can’t swallow. Everything comes out her nose,’” said Klobuchar, then a 35-year-old lawyer in Minneapolis, now a 59-year-old senator running for president. “And so from that moment on, it was like a disaster."

The pediatrician on-call had news: “We think she needs emergency surgery."

In her first day of life, Abigail was rushed into intensive care, subjected to a battery of scans and tests, and put under anesthesia so doctors could peer down her throat.

As that first day ended, though, a nurse plopped Klobuchar into a wheelchair and her husband, John, rolled her out of the building.

“Your time is up,” a nurse told her.

“And I go, ‘What?’” Klobuchar recalled. “And they said, ‘There’s just no way we can waive it.’”

In 1995, many American mothers faced that same arbitrary deadline: Insurance companies and hospitals, eager to trim costs, were sending women home after a maximum 24-hour stay, even when their babies required further treatment. Opponents of the practice called them “drive-through deliveries."

Twenty-five years later, Klobuchar traces her political awakening to that moment, when the most fundamental fear any parent can face transformed her into a determined activist.

“I was obsessed with it, reading up on it,” she recalled. “I saw it as injustice for moms. I thought if men had babies, this would never happen. It was one of those one-size-fits-all policies that just didn’t allow for any humanity. You’ve been up for 48 hours, you’re a brand-new mom and you have no idea what you’re doing, and they kick you out. You don’t know if your child’s going to live."



https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/01/31/klobuchar-birth-baby-political-rise/?arc404=true