- An Idaho woman documented her attempts to seek miscarriage care in the anti-abortion state.
- Carmen Broesder said doctors twice rejected her request for a dilation and curettage procedure.
An Idaho woman who spent eight days miscarrying before medical professionals did anything to alleviate her pain blamed the conservative state's stringent abortion law for her excruciating and infuriating experience.
Carmen Broesder, 35, who documented her weeks-long miscarriage and efforts to receive medical care in a series of TikTok videos, spoke to Insider earlier this month about the tragic and taxing process, sharing photos, videos, and documents from her ordeal.
"I already knew about" Idaho's strict abortion law, Broesder said. "Most women in Idaho do. We're all kind of scared of it. But I didn't know how quickly it would affect us."
Abortion is completely banned in Idaho with limited exceptions in the case of rape and incest or in instances where the procedure is necessary to save the pregnant person's life. The state was one of several with so-called "trigger laws" on the books that went into effect after the Supreme Court repealed Roe v. Wade in June.
But Broesder wasn't seeking an abortion when she went to the emergency room earlier this month; she and her boyfriend had been actively trying to conceive again following the birth of their 16-month-old daughter. Broesder wanted her baby very badly, which made the news of her most recent miscarriage — just one in a litany of non-viable pregnancies over the last few years — all the more heartbreaking.
In the eight days after learning she was miscarrying, Broesder said she twice requested doctors perform a dilation and curettage, a medical procedure in which health care providers remove tissue from inside the uterus to clear the uterine lining after a miscarriage or abortion, and twice she was denied the surgery, which is known as a D&C.
The procedure is recommended when a patient is experiencing heavy blood loss or has conditions that may make them medically vulnerable, Dr. Sarah Prager, an obstetrics and gynecology professor at the University of Washington's School of Medicine, told The New York Times in July. Patients may also request the surgery as an alternative to dealing with what can often be an emotionally grueling and long natural miscarriage process at home.
Because a D&C can be used for both miscarriage care and as an abortion method, the procedure's legality in states with total abortion bans has become murky in the aftermath of Roe's repeal. Medical experts long warned that the loss of abortion rights would inevitably lead to limits on miscarriage care.
Broesder's miscarriage ultimately lasted 19 days, she said. She visited three separate emergency rooms before receiving a pap procedure and medication that finally helped her pass what was left of the fetus, according to medical records shared with Insider and on TikTok.
Broesder audio-recorded parts of her final hospital visit where a doctor hinted at the possible underlying reason behind her arduous attempts to get help.
"Regarding D&C, there is some confusion — not confusion — some trepidation regarding, kind of, Idaho's new abortion law," a doctor told her, according to audio.
The doctor's comments confirmed to Broesder what she had suspected: Her denied D&C requests could be linked to physicians' apprehension around potentially breaking Idaho's abortion law in the aftermath of Roe's reversal.
"The baby is dead," Broesder told Insider, reflecting on her experience. "It's a cruel and unusual punishment to have to carry around a dead baby."
Broesder had experienced small miscarriages in the past.
When she started bleeding heavily on Thursday, December 8, she knew she needed help. There was something different about this pain, something unfamiliar about this much blood loss.
Hospital documents she shared on TikTok show that doctors at an Idaho emergency room diagnosed Broesder as miscarrying on December 8. The physician couldn't find a heartbeat, she told Insider. She was six weeks pregnant at the time.
Broesder said she didn't technically request a D&C during her first hospital visit, but only because a doctor outright told her she didn't need one. She was told to follow up with her obstetrician the following week during an already-scheduled appointment.
She continued to bleed throughout the weekend, battling increasing pain. On Tuesday, December 13, the blood loss intensified. Broesder described the pain as "cramps from hell." She said she later heard an ultrasound technician remark that her agonizing "cramps" were actually more likely contractions.
The ordeal wrought memories of past pregnancy trauma. Broesder was nine months pregnant in 2006 when doctors confirmed her child had no heartbeat, she said. She was induced and 36 hours later gave birth to her stillborn daughter. Physicians performed a D&C to complete the process.
"I've had the worst-case scenario," she told Insider.
Broesder's past losses made her acutely aware of what medical attention she needed this time around; she intrinsically knew she couldn't pass this fetus on her own, she said.
Broesder called her obstetrician and asked to cancel her appointment and have a D&C scheduled instead. Her physician, however, encouraged her to go back to the emergency room, assuring her that the doctors there would be most likely to help, she said.
Frustrated by her previous experience at the local emergency room, Broesder went to a different hospital this time where they diagnosed her with a complete miscarriage, according to documents she shared on TikTok. She requested a D&C, eager to relieve herself of the ongoing pain. But when the emergency room called her obstetrician to ask for approval for the surgery, her doctor refused, insisting that Broesder would clear out the rest naturally, she said.
"None of them seemed to want to approve the procedure on their own," Broesder said of the multiple doctors she saw.
As she grew increasingly frustrated at the emergency room, Broesder recorded a quick video of herself talking through tears. She posted the clip to TikTok from her hospital bed thinking it would be seen only by her friends and family members who follow her on the app.
"I made a crying TikTok. I can't get help…I don't know if I'm gonna die," she recalled. "It was a very raw moment for me."
Doctors at the second hospital sent her home with tranexamic acid, a medication used to treat excessive blood loss, according to hospital records.
Broesder's TikTok quickly went viral.
The video has since garnered nearly 90,000 likes and hundreds of comments. She told Insider she had a "quick panic attack" when she realized the number of people who now had such intimate information about her personal life and medical history. Then she started reading the comments.
She was floored by the flood of messages from women who seemed to know exactly how she was feeling. Her video was awash with support, medical advice, and tragic tales shared by people who said they had lost loved ones to similar circumstances.
But among the well wishes were more ominous messages: hateful comments, accusations, and even death threats, she said. Broesder had to play moderator, deleting comments from the "meanies."
All the while she was still actively miscarrying, losing large amounts of blood, confirmed by photos shared with Insider. As she continued posting TikTok updates and responding to people's comments, her newfound followers were growing worried, warning Broesder that she looked abnormally pale and sounded frail. They urged her to seek help.
"It had to get to the point where online strangers were telling me I looked terrible," she said. "I was in extreme agony and pain."
On Friday, December 16 — eight days after she first began bleeding and three days after a doctor diagnosed her with a complete miscarriage — she returned to the hospital for a third time, opting to go to a new emergency room that her TikTok followers had recommended in hopes of receiving "something stronger than Tylenol" to help her through the ongoing miscarriage.
She once again requested a D&C, asking a doctor to request the procedure from the hospital's on-call obstetrician instead of her own obstetrician who had twice rejected her request. But again, she was denied.
In audio Broesder recorded during the consultation and shared with Insider, a doctor said she was close to completing her miscarriage and there wasn't much left in the uterus to remove with a D&C.
Increasingly suspicious that politics was playing an outsized role in her medical care, she said she "played dumb," asking the doctor why she had twice been denied a procedure she was certain, based on past experience, would have stopped her pain.
He initially tried to skirt the question, she said. But as she pushed further, he eventually invoked Idaho's abortion law, saying physicians in the state have some trepidation around performing D&Cs, presumably in the aftermath of Roe's reversal, according to the audio recording.
"It validated my feelings," to hear a medical professional confirm her suspicions, she said. "And I was angry."
Despite denying the D&C, the doctor at the third hospital did finally help Broesder. He performed a pap procedure, removing part of the remaining fetus that had been stuck in her cervix and sent her home with Misoprostol, a medication that is used to induce labor, treat postpartum bleeding, and cause abortion, according to hospital documents Broesder shared on TikTok.
She spent the next week-and-a-half continuing to bleed, finally passing something "rather big and painful," photos shared with Insider confirmed, which she believes was her uterine lining.
Broesder said this pregnancy would be her last.
Before the miscarriage, Broesder and her boyfriend decided this would be their last attempt at having another child. The "mental drain" of losing children over and over again was too much.
"The fact that this one ended up being so horrific was an extra punch of, yeah, it's definitely the last try," she said.
The pain was immense, the loss insurmountable, but her fury is ignited most when she thinks about Idaho's abortion law, which she believes has scared doctors into submission and which she blames for her horrific ordeal, she told Insider.
At the peak of her bleeding, Broesder said she went through three pairs of pants in just two days, even while using ultra tampons, maxi pads, and a 12-hour menstrual disc that required changing every hour.
"Thank God I didn't die," she said.
After the onslaught of TikTok harassment, Broesder said she was hesitant about continuing to speak out. But she is scared for women, for her own daughter and niece who seem fated to grow up in a country where women's reproductive rights are far from guaranteed. She plans to continue talking about her ordeal; her goal is to spark a movement showing the ways that women are hurt by restrictive abortion laws.
"This is a subject that's been hushed for how long?" she said. "If we actually start talking about it, I wonder if people will listen."