The call came in the early evening on a summer’s day.
“Mama, I’m in the hospital.
“I’m OK, but they’re saying I’ve had an ectopic pregnancy. They’ll be taking me to surgery soon.”
I was in shock. She had just been married a short time and still had an IUD because they weren’t ready to have a baby. She had no idea she was pregnant. She just knew something wasn’t right when the pain and bleeding started.
Lindsay Bergstrom
I was more than 800 miles away and couldn’t help. And her husband was three hours away working in New York, so she was alone.
Thankfully, a dear friend in town, whom she called, encouraged her to seek medical attention right away and drove her to the emergency room at Chestnut Hill Hospital in Philadelphia. And thanks to a doctor who knew immediately what was happening and acted decisively and urgently, my daughter didn’t die.
But that isn’t the case for many women who find themselves in that situation. A recent report in ProPublica drives this point home. Their analysis showed the number of women who have died after an ectopic pregnancy has spiked in recent years.
According to the report, such deaths typically occur in the first trimester, after a pregnancy fails to properly implant in the uterus and begins to develop elsewhere, most commonly inside a fallopian tube. The embryo grows until it causes the organ to rupture, triggering catastrophic bleeding. That’s what happened to my daughter.
With prompt and appropriate medical treatment, maternal health experts say women should not die from ectopic pregnancies. And thankfully, my daughter is one who didn’t.
But there has been an increase in the number who have died. ProPublica’s analysis found between 2020 and 2025, the number of deaths has almost doubled from the previous six years — almost 200 compared to about 100.
And while chaos and hospital access during the COVID-19 pandemic certainly contributed to at least some of these deaths, the surge has persisted, raising concerns about how new anti-abortion laws have contributed to the spike.
An ectopic pregnancy is almost never viable, so doctors must terminate those pregnancies. But lawsuits and federal complaints have caused some medical professionals to hesitate or “flat-out refuse” to treat those women in states where they face criminal prosecution.
The stories from those women are harrowing. From the ProPublica report: “’I genuinely thought I was going to die,’ said Kyleigh Thurman, whose right fallopian tube ruptured after she struggled to get ectopic care in Texas in 2023.”
“Despite clear signs of an ectopic pregnancy, two emergency departments sent her home without treating her.”
In her case, despite clear signs of an ectopic pregnancy, two emergency departments sent her home without treating her.
And this was not an isolated instance. There have been reports like this across the board in states where strict abortion bans exist.
ProPublica found, beyond these anecdotes, that data collected from every state by the CDC shows a growing divide between women who live in states with strict abortion bans and those who don’t.
Anti-abortion proponents try to explain the data away by saying it’s because of the rise of mifepristone and misoprostol being prescribed by telehealth doctors that have caused the spike. But experts say the rates of ectopic pregnancies among these women is lower than in the general population.
So what’s causing the spike?
It seems to be because ectopic pregnancies are not so easily diagnosed unless a woman comes to the emergency room bleeding out, like my daughter. Diagnostic screening doesn’t always show where an embryo has implanted, and doctors are reluctant to operate to terminate a pregnancy unless the evidence is crystal clear for fear they will be prosecuted.
“Leitaea Lowrimore of Oklahoma was denied treatment for an ectopic pregnancy at multiple hospitals in February,” according to the ProPuplica article, and has filed a lawsuit.
They reported: “Lowrimore, who lives near the state border in Oklahoma, sought care at an Arkansas emergency department in February after experiencing abdominal pain and significant bleeding. She was sent home and told to return for more tests after being diagnosed with a ‘pregnancy of unknown location,’ because an ultrasound could not show where her pregnancy had implanted.
“Lowrimore visited three different hospitals across both states over the following week as she began passing blood clots and the pain intensified.
“The fact that the states’ abortion bans make exceptions for ectopic pregnancies did not help her, even though doctors acknowledged that was a possible diagnosis. In each visit, they didn’t treat her for that condition. One told her that intervening in her pregnancy could land him jail time — ‘10 years in the poky,’ according to the suit. ‘I felt like my life was a risk he couldn’t afford,’ she said in the lawsuit filing.”
“I felt like my life was a risk he couldn’t afford.”
And the stories could go on and on.
So what is the answer?
“Solutions are unlikely to come from the states themselves,” said ProPublica, adding that the data they gleaned found that states with strict bans are not studying whether their laws are contributing to maternal deaths.
But neither is the federal government. We’re already nearing the end of 2026, and the CDC only has statistics from 2024 on maternal death causes. DHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told Congress in April that improving maternal health outcomes was a priority, but the Trump administration has eliminated much of the staff devoted to researching the topic and hundreds of millions of dollars for health care research in general.
There is a total lack of awareness, research and data on women’s health.
So that’s where we need to start. We need more education about women’s bodies and how they work. We need research into every area of women’s health to best determine how to diagnose and treat.
We need better laws that are more nuanced than what exists in many states with total abortion bans. We need to free doctors to do their jobs instead of constantly worrying if what they do will result in prosecution.
Women have endured enough. We need common sense and compassion to prevail.
Lindsay Bergstrom serves as director of operations for Baptist News Global. She lives in Jacksonville, Fla.