An Oklahoma woman with a cancerous pregnancy said she was told to wait in the parking lot until she was sick enough to get an abortion

• An Oklahoma woman with a cancerous pregnancy said she was told to wait until she was sick enough for treatment.
• Jaci Statton told NPR she went to three hospitals before she had to go to Kansas for an abortion.

A woman in Oklahoma with a cancerous pregnancy said hospital workers asked her to wait in the parking lot until she started "crashing" before they could give her an abortion last month.

Jaci Statton had a partial molar pregnancy, a rare complication in which the placenta has irregular tissue, NPR reported. Molar pregnancies can cause a rare form of cancer and typically result in early miscarriages, according to the Mayo Clinic. They occur in about 1% of pregnancies, according to the Cleveland Clinic.

Statton and her husband have three young children, own a fishing guide company, and go fishing every day. The couple was looking forward to welcoming a new child into their family, NPR reported.

Statton told NPR that the hospital staff was "very sincere" and wasn't trying to be mean when they turned her away.

"They said, 'The best we can tell you to do is sit in the parking lot, and if anything else happens, we will be ready to help you," Statton told NPR. "But we cannot touch you unless you are crashing in front of us or your blood pressure goes so high that you are fixing to have a heart attack.'"

Oklahoma has three laws that ban abortion, with conflicting definitions for when exceptions are allowed, according to NPR. In March, the state supreme court ruled that abortions must be allowed if a patient's life is in danger.

Statton said doctors at the University of Oklahoma Medical Center told her that, although she was experiencing severe symptoms from her molar pregnancy, they could not help her and she only had around two weeks to live, Fox 25 reported.

OU Health did not immediately return Insider's request for comment on Wednesday.

'You will die'

"They said... 'You will die.' I had cancer cysts, cancer pockets around my baby, inside my uterus, and anytime one of those ruptured, I would bleed," Statton told the local station.

Statton told NPR that she was transferred to three different Oklahoma hospitals, all of which told her they couldn't give her an abortion, before doctors suggested that she leave and go to a state where abortion was legal.

She and her husband then drove to a Kansas abortion clinic where she had an abortion performed, according to the outlet.

Statton described the ordeal as "heartbreaking" and said she felt alone through the process and wished she could have gone to her own doctors and hospitals that she is familiar with for medical care, Fox 25 reported.

"I'm sorry, I didn't just go into that clinic to get rid of my baby. I had to go in there for my life," she told the outlet.