Should A Woman Be Forced To Carry A Dead Fetus For Weeks? South Carolina Says 'Yes!'
SC's 'Heartbeat Bill' forced Elisabeth Weber to carry a fetus without a heartbeat for several weeks.
Earlier this week, the new and whatever-the-opposite-of-improved-is Washington Post ran a column from congressional reporter Paul Kane about how, three years post-Dobbs, abortion has supposedly “faded” as a major issue for Democrats — though the crux of his argument was largely that they are also talking about other issues, like the horrors that Donald Trump and Elon Musk have wrought upon our country, in addition to abortion. It was … a take, I guess.
If you ask me, abortion rights are going to remain a fairly potent issue, especially so long as abortion ban states keep doing all the incredibly horrific things they’ve been doing. Like, for instance, forcing a woman to carry a dead baby for several weeks.
That, unfortunately, is exactly what happened to Elisabeth Weber of South Carolina, a 31-year-old mother of three who for several weeks was denied a D&C to remove the dead fetus inside her.
After going to the doctor at nine weeks, Weber was informed that the very-much-wanted child she was carrying did not have a heartbeat and had stopped growing at six weeks — meaning it had been dead, inside her, for three. She was told to go home and just wait for it to pass naturally.
That, however, didn’t happen.
“My body was not recognizing that I wasn't pregnant anymore. I was still completely bedridden with nausea, throwing up all the time,” Weber, who has suffered from a condition called hyperemesis gravidarum (HG), which causes severe nausea, vomiting and weight loss, in all of her pregnancies, told People magazine. “The baby had not grown at all. There's still no heartbeat. At that point, I was almost 10 weeks.”
So, three days later, she went back to the emergency room and asked for a dilation and curettage (D&C) — but unfortunately, due to South Carolina’s Fetal Heartbeat and Protection from Abortion Act, which bars abortion after doctors can detect fetal pole electrical activity, she was told that she would have to carry her heartbeat-less baby another week to even talk to a doctor about it. Because, hey! Maybe she was carrying the second coming of Jesus and the fetus could resurrect after a few days! That’s a thing that can happen, right? (It is not a thing that can happen.)
It was after that that Weber recorded an absolutely heartbreaking video and posted it on TikTok, where it went viral.
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“They confirmed that for sure, the baby is dead,” Weber said in the video. “No heartbeat, nothing like that. And they were talking about me getting a D&C, so that way my body won't have all these pregnancy symptoms, because I get something called HG when I’m pregnant. My body still thinks that I'm pregnant, it is not passing the baby the way it is supposed to.”
“My doctor came back and said, unfortunately, because of the new laws, I have to wait another week before I could do anything. In another week I have to come back, do another ultrasound, and then from there they can schedule a D&C,” she continued. “My baby has been sitting inside me dead for three weeks already, and now I have to wait another week knowing my baby is dead to do anything about it.”
Not only was this denial cruel, it was extremely dangerous, putting Weber at serious risk of infection and sepsis. Weirdly enough, carrying around a dead fetus is not exactly a very safe thing to do.
“I can't believe that I'm being forced to carry around my dead baby. 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,” Weber said to People.
Upon seeing the video, a patient advocate contacted Weber and suggested she go to a different hospital. Unfortunately, despite the fact that doctors at that hospital determined that she had an active infection, she still couldn’t get a damned D&C until the “waiting period” was over.
In an update, Weber explained that she was told both by the doctors and by a lawyer that the way the South Carolina law works is that, if she were to have gone to an appointment where the doctor detected a “heartbeat” (not a heartbeat), and then gone to a second appointment where they didn’t detect one, she would have been able to get the D&C or abortion pills right away. However, if you go to your first appointment and they tell you there’s no heartbeat and the fetus has been dead for three weeks, as happened with her, you have to wait two weeks to get one. If you go to the emergency room and get a more comprehensive diagnosis, they’ll shorten the waiting period to 11 days. Does this make sense? No, of course not. But it’s what happens when you have people with no medical background, who don’t know what they’re talking about, writing laws based on their own personal feelings.
Abortion should be legal to begin with, but to bar it even for situations when the fetus is dead is incomprehensibly cruel — and, again, dangerous. A recent analysis from ProPublica determined that even in Texas, where the procedure is banned almost entirely, Dallas has lower sepsis rates among pregnant people than does Houston, simply because doctors in Dallas are empowered to provide abortions to those with high-risk pregnancies and Houston doctors are not. This should not come as a surprise to anyone, but it’s still worth pointing out.
Stories like Elisabeth Weber’s are exactly why abortion was a privacy issue to begin with. Because this very personal decision should have been a private discussion with her healthcare providers about what was in her best interest, and not one involving state legislators in any capacity.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
If men could get pregnant abortion clinics would be as common as cell phone stores and vape shops.
From ProPublica:
"The Price of Remission"
"When I was diagnosed with cancer, I set out to understand why a single pill of Revlimid cost the same as a new iPhone. I’ve covered high drug prices as a reporter for years. What I discovered shocked even me.
https://www.propublica.org/article/revlimid-price-cancer-celgene-drugs-fda-multiple-myeloma?
and via Daily Kos:
Revlimid: A cancer drug that costs 25c to make - they charge 900$/pill
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/5/8/2321172/-Revlimid-A-cancer-drug-that-costs-25c-to-make-they-charge-900-pill?
"When Celgene launched Revlimid in December of 2005, it set the initial price at $55,000 a year, or $218 a pill, which was about double what analysts expected.
"Now since this is based on thalidomide, the cost to manufacture is pennies — they estimated 25 cents per pill. The original patents for thalidomide have long since expired. The company didn’t do any of the research that discovered that it could be used to treat cancer. And they have jacked the price 26 times since then — it currently stands at 892$/pill, or $19,660/month. The reporting from Pro Publica reveals that the price increases are largely driven by the need to maintain corporate profits along with increases in executive pay and bonuses that are based on sales figures.