California sues Catholic hospital for denying woman necessary abortion care

California Attorney General Rob Bonta announced earlier this week that the state is suing a Catholic hospital for refusing to provide an abortion to a patient who desperately needed the procedure to preserve her health and potentially save her life.

In February, a woman named Anna Nusslock, who gave birth to twins, went into early labor at 15 weeks of pregnancy. Nusslock was told by doctors at Providence St. Joseph Hospital in Eureka that none of the fetuses were viable and that the best option for her health was an abortion.

However, St. Joseph does not provide abortions while the fetal heartbeat is detectable unless a pregnant person's life is “sufficiently at risk.” Doctors told Nusslock that in her case, both twins' heartbeats would have to be undetectable for them to perform the procedure.

“I needed an abortion so my husband wouldn't lose his two daughters and his wife in one night,” Nusslock said at a news conference Monday.

This hospital's policies are “reminiscent of heartbeat laws in extremist red states,” Bonta said during the same press conference where he announced the lawsuit.

Instead of giving Nusslock a potentially life-saving abortion, her doctors had a different recommendation: Go to a hospital hundreds of miles away in San Francisco. They told Nusslock that she should take a medical helicopter to get there because the distance was too far and she would bleed out and probably die. The flight would have cost them an additional $40,000 in services.

Instead, Nusslock went to a hospital about 12 miles away, where she had an abortion in a maternity ward – but that hospital is scheduled to close later this month and therefore will not be an option for pregnant people in similar situations in the future.

Bonta says the hospital broke the law by denying Nusslock an abortion. After the fall of the Supreme Court Roe v. WadeSeveral conservative states have passed draconian laws restricting or banning access to abortion, but California has expanded its abortion protections. However, as Nusslock's case shows, hospitals in the state like St. Joseph are still denying medically necessary abortion care, the attorney general said.

“We have heard tragic stories from across the country about women who have been denied life-saving care, but these typically come from states that have banned abortion,” Bonta said at a news conference. “We are not immune to this problem.”

“We are taking measures to ensure they never do anything like this again,” Bonta added.

In a news release on his office's website, Bonta said the lawsuit was necessary to ensure that St. Joseph and other religious hospitals complied with the law. Bonta said:

With today's lawsuit, I want to make it clear to all Californians: abortion care is health care. You have the right to access timely and safe abortion services. At the California Department of Justice, we will use the full power of this office to hold accountable those who, like Providence, break the law.

Since the fall of roeThere have been dozens of cases in which pregnant people were denied much-needed abortion care, showing how state laws put people's lives at risk. Last month saw the first known death due to an anti-abortion law roeThe overthrow was reported – Amber Nicole Thurman, who died in Georgia in 2022 because that state's laws require pregnant people to be close to death before undergoing the procedure. Thurman waited an agonizing 20 hours until doctors finally performed the abortion, but by then it was too late. She died shortly afterwards, leaving behind her 6-year-old son.