- A beauty
YouTuber said she had to carry her dead fetus for two weeks before she could remove it. - Marlena Stell said a Texas anti-abortion law made doctors wary of giving her
miscarriage treatment.
A YouTuber in Texas said that she had to carry her dead fetus for two weeks after she learned the pregnancy wasn't viable, due to the state's "heartbeat" law.
Marlena Stell, who makes beauty videos, shared the story online in 2021 soon after Texas passed the "heartbeat" bill, banning abortion after six weeks of pregnancy.
After Roe v. Wade was overturned she spoke to The Washington Post and CNN about her experience, which is likely to become more common as more states implement similar or harsher laws.
Over the course of two weeks after she learned her fetus was not viable, Stell said struggled to access a treatment called dilation and curettage, or D and C.
The treatment — described here by the Mayo Clinic — can be used both as part of an abortion and also to treat a pregnancy that already ended.
Stell's case came to greater attention since the Supreme Court ruling on abortion, which introduced widespread confusion around other reproductive
In late August 2021, Stell had a pregnancy she "very much wanted," she said on YouTube, where she has 1.47 million subscribers.
But in her ninth week, during an ultrasound, she learned that there were no signs of life, she said. "I'm looking on the screen and it looks like this black empty tomb. Just hollow," she said in the video.
She was told that she had a blighted ovum — which stops an embryo from developing — and would miscarry soon, she said.
Stell said that due to her age, weight and other health factors, she was a high-risk patient. She was familiar with the situation, saying that in 2018, when living in Washington state, she lost an earlier pregnancy after which her body did not naturally miscarry.
After walking around in extreme pain, she opted for a D and C procedure to remove that fetus.
When he sought the same treatment three years later in Texas "that option was not even on the table" at first, she said in her video. The "heartbeat" law had gone into effect.
Doctors were wary of providing a D and C because it is also used in abortions, and asked her to get a second ultrasound to confirm what the her OB-GYN had already told her — that her fetus was dead.
It took two weeks, she said, from first learning her pregnancy was over and being able to get closure and have the fetus removed.
The extra step of a second ultrasound was traumatizing, she said. At the clinic, she was greeted by a "chipper" nurse who Stell paraphrased as saying: "'all right! You get to see the baby today.'"
Stell said she simply broke down in the screening room.
"When you know that you're there because a politician told you you had to be, and you somehow needed to prove that your pregnancy wasn't viable, it feels like an extra layer of violation."