A Missouri woman is suing a Kansas hospital where she says she was denied an emergency abortion after she went into premature labor at 18 weeks of pregnancy, alleging she was denied emergency health-stabilizing care.
The lawsuit comes a year after a government investigation by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services found that hospitals in Missouri and Kansas violated federal law when they refused to provide Mylissa Farmer with abortion care.
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Farmer is now suing the University of Kansas Health System and the hospital authority that governs it under a law — Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act, EMTALA — that federally mandates emergency stabilizing care for all patients in hospitals funded by Medicare.
In a lawsuit, Farmer alleged that she suffered preterm premature rupture of membranes — when a pregnant woman’s water breaks before the pregnancy is viable — in August 2022 and she had lost all her amniotic fluid by the time she arrived at the Kansas Hospital. She alleges she had been sent to the hospital after being turned away from a Missouri hospital due to the state’s abortion ban.