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Harmonie Perrone, 28, knew she was probably having an ectopic pregnancy, and she knew exactly what she needed to do: seek medical care immediately, before life-threatening complications set in.
But she was denied that care twice as she feared for her life – and, after the delay in care, she lost her fertility, she says in a new lawsuit filed Monday.
All of this happened in Illinois, a top destination for abortion care, where reproductive rights are enshrined in law and medical providers are required to offer emergency care regardless of religious beliefs.
“What is so shocking about her situation is that it happened in a state where abortion is supposed to be among the most protected, where it is supposed to be the most accessible,” said Molly Duane, litigation director of Amplify Legal, which is involved in Perrone’s lawsuit.
“Notwithstanding these protections against state actors, you still have religiously affiliated hospitals like Advocate Good Shepherd that are effectively administering shadow abortion bans everywhere in the country.”
When Perrone felt the pain and saw the blood, she immediately suspected she was having another ectopic pregnancy. Years before, she’d lost her right fallopian tube with the first ectopic pregnancy, but she was able to act quickly with the second and save her left fallopian tube by getting the medication methotrexate. The third time she felt the symptoms, she knew she needed to act as quickly as possible – and that her life was on the line, because complications could arise within hours. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) recommends administering methotrexate, the medication to treat ectopic pregnancy, as soon as possible.
But when she went to her local hospital, Advocate Good Shepherd, she was not seen by a doctor, she said. They did ultrasounds and detected a mass on the left fallopian tube. Perrone and her husband had been trying to have a baby for years.
“I was crying my eyes out,” she said. “I wanted to get methotrexate. I knew that this was the standard practice.”
Instead, she was sent home with an appointment the next day with an obstetrician-gynecologist at what turned out to be a med spa, where she was denied care again, Perrone said. She had just switched insurance policies a few days before and hadn’t yet set up a new regular OB-GYN – and she was told Dr Dympna Coll was a specialist, Perrone said.
“I kept asking her to help me,” she said. But Coll refused to administer methotrexate, Perrone alleged. As she remembered it, the doctor told her “we have to weigh out the life of the mother and the baby, and there’s a 1% chance that there is a baby in there”. When Perrone asked about her right to an abortion under Illinois law, the doctor said “you’re not going to bully me into doing this”, Perrone said.
Advocate Good Shepherd and Coll did not respond to the Guardian’s press inquiries by publication time.
Perrone went to another clinic, and then on to a second hospital, with the growing fear that she was going to die. She felt betrayed by the medical providers she’d trusted with her life. She remembered bellowing in the hallway of the second hospital: “Somebody freaking help me, please.” Finally, she received methotrexate, more than 24 hours after she first sought care.
Then, the hardest part. Perrone can’t talk about it without crying. Six days later, at a sales meeting for work, she stood and felt intense pain. “I knew,” she said. “We have been trying to get pregnant for years, and now this is how it was coming to an end.”
Perrone and her husband went straight to the second hospital this time, and she underwent surgery.
“When they were opening me up, my tube was already rupturing. That was the end of my fertility,” she said. She believes if she’d received methotrexate even hours earlier than she did, her tube could have been saved.
The Illinois Hospital Emergency Service Act explicitly identifies ectopic pregnancy as an acute medical condition that requires stabilizing care. If the facility is unable to provide that care, the law requires immediate transfer. A separate law in Illinois, called the Health Care Right of Conscience Act, does not apply in the context of emergency medical care, said Allison Siebeneck, director of the Women’s and Reproductive Rights Project at the ACLU of Illinois, which is supporting Perrone’s lawsuit.
“A hospital under federal law as well as state law has to both screen the patient and either stabilize them or to transfer them. This is what makes sense in an emergency. You can’t just say: ‘OK, bye,’” Siebeneck said. The lawyers have also submitted a federal complaint that the hospital violated the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (Emtala).
Perrone went on TikTok to talk about her experiences – first about being denied care, and then about the loss of her fertility. Her videos went viral. As Perrone began working with the lawyers on the lawsuit, she received a knock on the door – Coll was suing her for defamation.
“Not only has she lost her ability to have children without IVF, but she’s now being sued for speaking out about that experience,” Duane said.
Perrone is hesitant to try in vitro fertilization, a process that can take thousands of dollars and several rounds of treatment. “If I save, and I maybe open a credit card and I go and do this for myself and it doesn’t work, that’s another letdown. I don’t want to go through that again,” Perrone said. “That’s a lot of hope to be crushed over and over and over again.” She feels a strain already in her relationship with her husband because of the losses and the trauma.
“He wants to have a family with me, and I can’t give him that,” Perrone said. “It feels like a part of who we were is no longer there.”
Illinois is considered a haven state for protecting families like Perrone’s, said Siebeneck. “These rights are protected under law. You absolutely have the right to go into any hospital emergency room in the state and receive emergency medical care,” she said. Patients, whether they live in Illinois or travel from states with abortion bans, are “expecting to receive that emergency care, but whether or not they are able to can depend on which hospital they walk up to”, Siebeneck added.
That can have significant consequences on their health and well-being, she said. “We don’t want people to be deterred or to be afraid that they cannot access this care because of stories like this one.”
