Leitaea Lowrimore was 28 years old, a mother of a one-year-old daughter, when she arrived at an Arkansas emergency room with vaginal bleeding, sharp pain, low hormone levels, and no visible embryo on a uterine ultrasound. These are the hallmark symptoms of an ectopic pregnancy, a condition that is never viable and can be fatal. The doctor said he wanted to discharge her. When she and her husband refused, the doctor eventually acknowledged her pregnancy was probably ectopic but told her that if he treated her now, he could face 10 years in prison.

Over the course of the following week, three emergency rooms in two states turned her away. On the three-hour drive to Kansas, where she finally received the standard of care, her legs went numb. She turned to her husband and asked: am I going to die? Am I going to make it home?

She made it. But she knows now that death was a real possibility. And she is terrified of what could happen if she gets pregnant again.

This is not a hypothetical consequence of abortion bans. It is a documented, lived reality that is happening to real women at real hospitals right now. The Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, a federal law that has been on the books since 1986, requires hospitals to stabilize patients experiencing medical emergencies. Ectopic pregnancies are medical emergencies. They are not abortions of choice. They are not viable pregnancies. They are situations in which a woman's life is at risk and the standard of care is clear. And yet three hospitals in Arkansas and Oklahoma turned Lowrimore away because the doctors and administrators in those facilities were more afraid of prosecution than they were focused on their patient.

The doctor who acknowledged Lowrimore's probable ectopic pregnancy and cited the threat of 10 years in prison was not describing a hypothetical. He was describing a legal reality that abortion bans have created: one in which physicians are forced to choose between their medical judgment and their freedom. That is not a healthcare system. It is a system in which the law has been allowed to override medicine, and in which patients bear the consequences of that override with their bodies and sometimes their lives.

No woman should have to drive three hours with numb legs, asking her husband whether she will survive, because three emergency rooms were too afraid of prosecution to treat a medical emergency. No doctor should have to tell a dying patient that helping her could mean prison. And no federal administration should be permitted to reinterpret EMTALA in ways that allow hospitals to turn away patients experiencing life-threatening conditions because of the political context surrounding their care.

Sign this petition to demand the federal government enforce EMTALA and hold hospitals accountable for denying emergency care to patients with ectopic pregnancies and other life-threatening conditions, protect physicians from criminal prosecution for providing medically necessary emergency treatment, and call on Arkansas officials to support the legal challenge seeking to restore the constitutional right to life, liberty, and medical care for every person in the state.