An Idaho woman who documented her 19-day miscarriage on TikTok has said the state’s near-total abortion ban was a punishment for her to carry her dead baby inside her.
Carmen Broesder, 35, posted a series of videos, including audio and pictures to document her excruciating and infuriating experience of active miscarriage and said doctors twice rejected a surgery on her as she continued to suffer cramps and bleeding.
Ms Broesder was six weeks pregnant when an emergency room in Idaho diagnosed her miscarrying her baby on 8 December, according to hospital documents shared on TikTok.
She continued to bleed, battling intense pain and the blood loss intensified on 13 December. She said an ultrasound technician had said that her painful cramps were more like contractions.
“I’ve been actively miscarrying since the 8th,” she said in one of her videos. “I have gone to a doctor and this is my second visit to the ER.
“If you’re wondering why women’s rights matter, I’m just going to f***ing bleed out on this table before somebody comes and actually helps me. This is my life. Nobody actually is coming to help. They’re always going to send me home.”
Idaho completely banned abortions on 25 August 2022 preventing medical professionals from providing abortions with limited exceptions in the case of rape and incest. The state had so-called trigger laws which went into effect after the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade in June last year.
Ms Broesder said she was not seeking an abortion and she and her boyfriend were trying to conceive following the birth of their 16-month-old daughter.
She requested doctors to perform dilation and curettage (D&C), a medical procedure to remove unwanted tissues from inside the uterus to clean the uterine lining after a miscarriage or abortion.
“The baby is dead,” Ms Broesder told Insider, recalling her experience. “It’s a cruel and unusual punishment to have to carry around a dead baby.”
In one of her videos, she recorded herself crying as she feared she might die.
On 16 December, after days of bleeding, she returned to a different doctor for the third time on the recommendation of a TikTok follower. She said she was first denied D&C procedure but later perform a pap procedure on her, removing the remaining parts of the fetus that were stuck in her cervix.
They gave her a medication that is used to induce labor and treat postpartum bleeding, according to hospital documents Broesder shared on TikTok.
She continued to bleed for the next week and a half before she passed something “rather big and painful,” Ms Broesder told Insider.
Her posts on TikTok went viral with one video receiving more than 90,000 likes and hundreds of comments. She said she hoped sharing her ordeal with people could inspire changes in the restrictive abortion laws.
Ms Broesder said she is fully recovered now and it took almost 19 days to pull through her ordeal.
