MERIDIAN, Idaho — Nicole Miller and her husband were ecstatic when they found out last year that she was pregnant with their third child. They became “even more excited” when they found out they would be having their first son.
The growing family picked out his name – Maddox David – and began making preparations for the new baby.
Then, at 17 weeks pregnant, Miller began lightly bleeding. At 20 weeks, she woke up “hemorrhaging” and rushed to the emergency room.
"And that’s kind of where we were confronted with the laws,” Miller said in a recent Zoom interview from her home in Idaho.
A strict ban on abortions in the state allows a pregnancy to be terminated if needed to save a woman’s life, but not to preserve her health — a reality Idaho doctors say has sometimes prevented them from providing the procedure unless someone is on the brink of death.
Physicians violating Idaho’s law face up to five years in prison and losing their medical licenses.
It was a risk Miller says her doctor wouldn’t take.
“I asked him if he was willing to help me or if he could help me,” she recounted. “And he said he couldn’t risk his career.”
Instead, the hospital put her and her husband on a small plane headed for Utah, where abortion is currently legal beyond 18 weeks of pregnancy if necessary to prevent “serious risk of substantial and irreversible impairment of major bodily function.” Her mother and two young daughters rushed behind her by car.
“I was terrified,” Miller said. “I didn’t know if I was going to make it there. I was still actively bleeding. ... I just wanted to see my girls again, and I didn’t want anything to happen to me.”
Miller is one of at least seven women who has been airlifted from Idaho to other states – including Utah, Washington and Oregon – in recent months.
The state’s largest healthcare provider, St. Luke’s, said recently that it had airlifted six patients since January. That number doesn’t account for Miller, who was transported to Utah in September, or for women who may have crossed state lines on their own.
(Idaho Attorney General Raúl Labrador previously questioned St. Luke’s numbers, saying in April that the hospital’s statements were not made under oath. “I would hate to think that St. Luke’s or any other hospital is trying to do something like this just to make a political statement,” he said, according to reporting from the Idaho Statesman.)
When Miller arrived at the University of Utah, she says doctors told her there was nothing they could do to save her pregnancy. But it wasn’t until the day after her procedure that she heard a nurse use the word “abortion” for the first time.
“And at the time, I was angry when she said that, because I very much wanted my baby – my son,” she said. “And now, looking back, you know, I don’t see that as a bad, negative word; because it saved me that day. So that I can be here for my girls and husband.”
'THERE'S A LOT OF CONFUSION'
In June, the U.S. Supreme Court sidestepped a ruling on whether federal law requires states to provide pregnancy terminations in medical emergencies even in cases where the procedure would otherwise be illegal.
That decision – which stemmed from a challenge to Idaho’s laws – reinstated a previous ruling, which will allow doctors in the state to perform emergency abortions as the legal questions in the case move through the lower courts. That means Idaho women are less likely to be airlifted to nearby states like Utah for the procedure for now.
But Gail Deady, a senior staff attorney with the Center for Reproductive Rights, stressed that the injunction is temporary.
“Right now doctors have more safety, I think, more comfort,” she said in an interview. “But it is not a permanent ruling, and it’s not a permanent situation.”
The Center for Reproductive Rights is currently working through a separate case it filed against the state on behalf of four women in Idaho who were denied abortions despite pregnancy complications. Deady said the trial in that case is expected to begin this fall.
“The lawsuit is seeking under the Idaho Constitution a health exception to the extreme abortion ban and an exception that physicians can understand,” she said. “There’s a lot of confusion about what doctors are allowed to do and what they are not allowed to do. And that results in physicians being very afraid to provide care that may even be allowed under the abortion ban.”
In a separate review of the state’s abortion ban last year, the Idaho Supreme Court rejected doctors’ arguments that the law was too vague, ruling instead that the law was understandable to any person of “ordinary intelligence."
The court said Idaho’s law gives latitude to providers to use their “good faith medical judgment” to determine whether an abortion is necessary to save a woman’s life, and it said there was no requirement that a woman be imminently at risk of death to do so.
Blaine Conzatti, a lobbyist with the Idaho Family Policy Center who helped push for some of the state’s anti-abortion laws, pointed to that ruling previously in an interview with FOX 13 News as evidence that doctors can provide needed care. He believes Idaho doctors are transferring patients with severe medical complications because they’re operating on bad legal advice from their hospitals.
"From our perspective, many of these conditions are being used as straw man arguments when in fact a woman could indeed get an abortion because that condition very well would endanger that mother’s life,” he argued in an April interview.
But the court’s ruling also noted that, under the law, any physician could be “charged, arrested, and confined until trial even if the physician initially claims they did it to preserve the life of the mother, or based on reported rape or incest,” the court noted. “Only later, at trial,” could the physician argue that it was "a justifiable abortion that warrants acquittal and release.”
'I DIDN'T THINK IT COULD HAPPEN TO ME'
About two weeks after she was discharged from the hospital, Miller said she and her husband drove back to Utah from Idaho to pick up her son’s ashes.
A few weeks after that, she said, an “overwhelming anger” began to build at what she’d been through.
“I wanted to tell my story then,” she said. “And after talking to some friends and family, it just wasn’t the right time for me. I was still very much grieving at that time. And I feel like at that time, I needed to heal some more before I could come forward.”
Now, with a little more distance from the experience, Miller said she feels it's important to speak out more publicly.
“I feel like this can’t happen to anybody else. It needs to stop,” she said. “There needs to be a change in the law to stop this from happening. I didn’t think it could happen to me, and it did. And it could happen to anyone.”
Miller has also agreed to tell her story in court, as a witness in the case brought by the Center for Reproductive Rights.
“She’s going to be able to come to court and to testify to tell her story and make sure that the court knows what happened to her and what is still happening to people in similar situations in Idaho,” Deady said.
Miller said she’d like to have more children but feels like Idaho’s law has made it an “impossible” decision. She worries about what would happen if a future pregnancy faced similar complications, and about whether she’d be able to make it somewhere in time for care.
The trauma she experienced stays with her, too.
“Not only was I losing my pregnancy and my baby that day, but the position that this law put me in that day has left me with fear and anxiety,” she said. “And it’s something that will stick with me for the rest of my life.”
But she said the kindness that she received from the doctors at the University of Utah who provided her with the care she needed is something that will stick with her, too.
“I was met with such compassion by those nurses and doctors,” Miller said. “I felt like a person again. I felt like I was being seen. And I felt safe again, even though I was still in a scary situation. I just felt like somebody had me. And I’m very grateful for that.”