South Carolina Abortion Ban Forced Woman to Carry Fetus With No Heartbeat for Weeks

Weeks after sharing an emotional video on TikTok about her experience being told by doctors that they couldn't provide her with standard miscarriage care under South Carolina's abortion ban, Elisabeth Weber spoke out Tuesday about how she was forced to continue carrying her fetus for weeks after learning it had no heartbeat and had stopped developing.

As Weber told People magazine, "My baby didn't have a heartbeat, and it still prevented me from getting care" under South Carolina's law—ironically called the Fetal Heartbeat and Protection from Abortion Act, so named because it bars residents from getting abortion care after fetal cardiac activity can be detected at about six weeks of pregnancy.

The 31-year-old mother of three found out in late March at nine weeks pregnant that her fetus—already given a name by Weber and her husband, who felt certain they were having a boy—had stopped growing at six weeks and one day.

Weber was sent home from her local ER to allow the miscarriage to be completed naturally, but she returned to the hospital after she continued to have symptoms of hyperemesis gravidarum (HG)—extreme, persistent nausea and vomiting—which she'd had with all of her pregnancies.

"They confirmed that for sure, the baby is dead," Weber said in her TikTok video, which was posted March 31. "No heartbeat, nothing like that. And they were talking about me getting a D&C [dilation and curettage], so that way my body won't have all these pregnancy symptoms... My body still thinks that I'm pregnant, it is not passing the baby the way it is supposed to."

But a doctor at her second visit to the ER told her she would have to wait another week—two weeks from when her miscarriage was first detected—and have repeat ultrasounds to continue confirming the pregnancy was not viable before Weber could have a D&C, a standard procedure that is commonly used to remove fetal tissue that has not been naturally expelled after a miscarriage.

She told People that while mourning her loss and caring for her three children, she was "so sick" due to her HG.

"I have three kids, and waiting around to go into a mini-labor is just hard," Weber said.

"I can't believe that I'm being forced to carry around my dead baby," she told People. "They know it's gone, they know it's dead, they know it's stopped developing, and now I'm being forced to carry it... There's really no feeling like when your womb becomes a tomb."

Writer and advocate Jessica Valenti, who covers Republicans' attacks on reproductive rights at her newsletter, Abortion, Every Day, interviewed Weber shortly after she posted her TikTok video.

Valenti noted that while doctors told Weber they could provide her with standard miscarriage care only if she developed sepsis or began hemorrhaging before they were able to perform another ultrasound, HG's "symptoms can mimic those of infection and sepsis."

"How will she know if she's really sick from the retained tissue, she asks, if she's already feeling awful every day?" wrote Valenti in early April, when Weber was still waiting for treatment and carrying her nonviable pregnancy. "Weber also has asthma. She's afraid she won't be able to tell the difference between her usual shortness of breath and the signs of something much worse."

Weber told Valenti that at least one doctor she spoke with expressed regret about South Carolina's abortion ban, one of 19 state bans in the country.

"I could see it was breaking her heart just to say it," Weber said of the doctor, who told her, "I wish it was different. I wish we could help you."

Valenti wrote that "when Weber told her it was okay, the doctor responded, 'It's not okay.'"

Weber told People she was even denied a D&C after going to a different hospital where she found out that her "white blood cell count was super high."

"Everything was showing that I was in an active infection," she said, but she was still required to wait for care.

"Republicans would have us believe that their laws protect women's health, but what would they call what's happening [to] this South Carolina mom right now?" wrote Valenti in April.

In a video update Weber posted on TikTok last week after finally getting care, she shared that she and her husband had decided not to have any more children after their ordeal.

"We just can't chance going through something like that again," said Weber.