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Petula Dvorak

Away from the crowd, the dueling speakers, the yelling, the chants and a five-piece brass band that underscored the chaotic scene with a steady beat, Mylissa Farmer finally exhaled in the shade of a red oak tree.

“I never spoke in public before,” said Farmer, who had made her debut minutes earlier on Wednesday afternoon, before the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court as a case about <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/04/24/supreme-court-arguments-abortions-emergency-emtala/" target=_blank>emergency abortion care</a> was being heard inside.

“I just knew being here today, it’s the right thing to do,” she said, after telling a large crowd outside that court about her harrowing night, pinballing across three states, her amniotic fluid leaking, her fetus being crushed in her womb, her body headed toward sepsis, trying to find a hospital that wasn’t too bound up by politics to give her care.

Farmer, unlike many of the activists, politicians, lobbyists and lawyers who take a grand stand in the nation’s capital, never wanted to come to Washington.

And never specifically on this issue — <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/abortion/" target="_blank" class="contextual_link">abortion</a>.

“I’ve always believed that everyone has a right to their own decisions,” she said.

“But for my own personal beliefs? I did not believe in doing that.”

Farmer’s reluctant visit to Washington is a call to the shoulder-shruggers of America to listen. To engage. To understand.

It’s too easy to dismiss the debate with a scowl:

“I live in a pretty conservative area,” Farmer said, days before she headed east and opened herself up to becoming a figure in this polarizing issue. “And I’d say 95 percent of [the people here] aren’t even consciously aware that something like this could happen.”

When apolitical, quiet Farmer was pregnant — and delighted to have a baby she was going to name for the Irish warrior queen, Maeve — the political decisions and debates taking place more than 1,000 miles away from her home in Missouri, the March for Life, the pink hats, the rancor over this issue, reached into her life and ravaged it.

“Back in August of 2022, I was about 18 weeks pregnant,” Farmer began her speech, a hint of Ozark in her voice as she described how “excited” and “overjoyed” she and her partner were about the pregnancy.

But a day after a routine visit to the doctor, “I woke up and had a gush of fluid come out,” she said, as a crowd filled with at least two dozen emergency room doctors in white coats listened, nodding, understanding where she was going with this.

Meanwhile, a counterprotester in a hot pink dress and silver sandals said into a sound system cranked to compete with Farmer’s story that she was “sorry” for the pain of women denied abortion care.

Farmer, 43, is low key. She’s not on social media, she works a boring job in customer service, she wore a shirt to the rally with the face of her fur-baby, an Australian shepherd named Mayhem. She took a breath and continued.

“We went to the ER for testing,” Farmer continued. Doctors confirmed that her water broke and that her pregnancy would not survive.

They told her she was at risk of “serious infection, sepsis, blood clots and hemorrhaging,” she said to the crowd. “They even warned me that I could lose my uterus and die.”

But those same doctors, overruled by the legal departments at their hospitals, told her she would have to leave her home state to get care. Missouri completely banned abortion in June 2022, around the time Farmer got pregnant. And because a fetal heartbeat was still detected, the doctors in Missouri said they couldn’t take any emergency action.

So she and her partner — now her husband — drove across the state line to Kansas that night.

“It was surreal,” she told me. “The fear, the pain, the disbelief that we’re losing our daughter. I couldn’t believe that all of this was happening.”

When they got to Kansas, she heard the same refrain.

“They told me that it was too politically heated in this environment right now to give me my health care,” she said.

She called a local politician for help. He sent her to a false-front abortion clinic, the kind of place that exists to persuade women not to have abortions after luring them in with misleading advertisements.

She finally got the health care she needed in Illinois, at an abortion clinic. It was a two-day race across state lines to save her life.

The National Women’s Law Center <a href="https://nwlc.org/resource/nwlc-files-emtala-and-sex-discrimination-complaints-on-behalf-of-mylissa-farmer/" target=_blank>filed a complaint</a> about Farmer’s <a href="https://nwlc.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/2022.11.08-Mylissa-Farmer-EMTALA-complaint.pdf" target=_blank>case</a> with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

The federal investigation that followed determined that Freeman Hospital West in Joplin, Mo., and the University of Kansas Health System in Kansas City, Kan., <a href="https://nwlc.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Letter-to-Hospitals-FINAL.docx_Completed.pdf" target=_blank>failed to provide</a> Farmer the medical care she needed in violation of the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act.

And that’s what the court was debating on Wednesday, whether the 40-year-old act preempts the new ban on abortions that some states, in this case Idaho, have adopted.

Inside, conservative justices were skeptical of the law’s reach. They argued about federal funding, fetal personhood, the ethics of airlifting women in helicopters, as though they were in a war zone, to get them to hospitals willing to do the medical procedures that may save their lives.

Outside, Farmer was glad to be done and eager to see the sights of Washington on her first trip to the nation’s capital.

She had lost her pregnancy, her home, her health insurance and her fertility in this long, emotional and legal fight. She had long conversations with her husband about whether she should go public with her story. With the rally behind her, she was glad she had come to Washington.

“I just wanted it to mean something,” she said.

University of Southern California

Petula is a columnist for The Post's local team who writes about homeless shelters, gun control, high heels, high school choirs, the politics of parenting, jails, abortion clinics, mayors, modern families, strip clubs and gas prices, among other things. Before coming to The Post, she covered social issues, crime and courts.

She never wanted an abortion, then she needed one. Now she’s an activist.

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