Doctors knew my baby was going to be stillborn. They refused to intervene, even though my life was at risk

This story is part of an investigative series and new documentary, The A-Word, by The Independent examining the state of abortion access and reproductive care in the US after the fall of Roe v Wade.

Nicole Blackmon was in the depths of mourning, her only son gunned down by stray bullets just months beforehand, when she discovered in July 2022 that she was pregnant with a baby she and her husband called their “miracle.”

The pregnancy was a surprise that brought a welcome new emotion — “joy,” Nicole says in The A-Word, a new documentary by The Independent — amid profound grief; her bright and talented 14-year-old, Daniel, had been killed that February while standing on the porch of a friend’s house in the family’s native Mobile, Alabama.

Nicole had told him, when Daniel was younger, to expect a baby sister or brother — though her attempts to conceive proved futile for years. Only in the wake of his tragic, senseless murder did she find herself pregnant, a cherished gift she and her husband welcomed and threw themselves whole-heartedly into preparing for — moving to Tennessee and leaving Alabama, with its painful memories, behind.

But the hopeful start to a new chapter was devastatingly short-lived. It was in Tennessee that doctors informed Nicole there were complications to the already high-risk pregnancy. At 15 weeks pregnant, she was informed that not only would her baby not survive, but her life was also in jeopardy — and state laws meant there was nothing they could do about it.

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In Tennessee, where Nicole had dreamt of building a new life with a new baby, where she’d hoped to share memories of the son so tragically taken from her, she instead was forced to carry an unviable pregnancy to term. She lost another son — delivering a stillborn baby she named Ethan after 32 hours of labor the month after Daniel would have turned 15.

Now she’s one of the nine plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the state challenging its total abortion ban as applied to pregnant women with emergent medical conditions. Similar suits were filed simultaneously last year in Idaho and Oklahoma as Nicole, and other outraged plaintiffs, fight to ensure that no more women suffer the unthinkable traumas they endured.

“If it takes me speaking up, telling my story, to fight for women who have gone through what I’ve gone through … I would like for the law to change,” Nicole tells The Independent. “Because there are women that might, in the future, end up in my situation, and I want them at least to have a better chance of having the rights to have a better option [than] what I did.

“Women might die,” she says. “I am happy to say that I did survive for that: Just so I can sit here today and speak up and tell my story now.”

Nicole found out she was pregnant the month after the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade in June 2022, and Tennessee’s criminal abortion ban first went into effect that August. During her pregnancy, and at the time of her stillborn delivery in December 2022, the state ban did not allow for exceptions if a fetus had a condition incompatible with life. The ban also noted that physicians would have to bear the burden of proof to establish that any performed abortion was necessary to prevent death or serious, irreversible injury to the mother.

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The Tennessee governor signed an extremely narrow exemption to the legislation in April 2023 which health and reproductive rights advocates argue remains far too restrictive. The Center for Reproductive Rights filed suits last year in several states on behalf of plaintiffs including Nicole, arguing in the Tennessee case that the ban is unconstitutional — in addition to asking the state court to “clarify the medical condition exception by issuing a declaration about when physicians can legally provide abortion care in Tennessee.”

For Nicole, who has worked in healthcare for more than a decade — holding jobs ranging from pharmacy tech to caregiver — her previous faith in the industry has shattered, along with any notions that legislators are making well-informed decisions.

“I do wish that we were actually heard more … I do feel like women, when it comes to [their] medical health voice, are not actually heard enough,” she tells The Independent. “I feel like when they made the law, they just didn’t think it all the way through about certain situations that could happen.”

Her own heartbreaking situation fell right through the cracks. But it now stands as a glaring example of just how dangerous these new bans can be.

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Nicole, now 32, was already suffering from pre-existing conditions when she learned she was expecting. She not only battled PTSD, anxiety and depression in the wake of Daniel’s recent murder but was also diagnosed with hypertension and a brain condition, which required medication she couldn’t continue while pregnant.

Still, she was willing to forge ahead and take the risks, foregoing prescriptions that could have endangered the baby.

“I looked at it as my miracle child … after so long of just trying and no luck, and then finally getting pregnant after just losing one,” Nicole tells The Independent. “It was almost as if it was just joy, happiness … but also still, at the same time, sad – how do you prepare yourself to tell your future child about their brother that they lost?”

Soon, however, more immediate and grave concerns took over. During Nicole’s second trimester, the baby was diagnosed with a lethal condition called limb-body-wall complex, in which the organs develop outside of the body. Initially, it was thought the baby’s condition could be corrected through a procedure. Subsequent tests showed that the condition was unfixable.

All the while, Nicole’s personal health continued to deteriorate. She was at ongoing high risk of stroke.

She “met with her new doctors for a long time to discuss the diagnosis and her options,” according to the lawsuit. “Her doctors and a genetic counselor advised Nicole to consider an abortion because her baby was no longer receiving nutrients through the placenta, was extremely unlikely to survive to birth, and continuing the pregnancy would put increasing strain on Nicole’s body.

“The genetic counselor gave Nicole resources and information regarding out-of-state abortion.”

Nicole was sick, terrified and too fragile to travel.

“I was balancing my life with going forward with the pregnancy,” she tells The Independent. “It was like I was at a thin line of just, any moment, collapsing, passing out, dying … you’re going through all of this and telling yourself, Try not to stress out about all of this, because if you stress out about this, you can just basically kill yourself.”

When the doctors informed her the new laws prevented them from intervening, “it was like, ‘Are you serious?’” Nicole says.

“‘There’s no loophole or anything to try to save me or women that are in my situation? I’m about to die, and you’re telling me that, because of a law, I’m unable to get treatment or help?

“And then the information I was given was for me to just — as if anyone can just up and [go] — just jump to a whole ‘nother state and have the finances to still survive,” she says. “Me and my husband, we did the research. And even if we were to go to a different state, we’d be going to a state that we knew nothing about, [knew] nothing about this doctor, [the] doctor did not know anything about my health, my condition.

“Not only that, the finances of going to a different state, of taking off work, and also the amount of costs for a hotel and food and transportation and all that just to be there and get back … No one talks about all of that, how you have to pay for all of that stuff, too.”

Travel, hence an abortion, was logistically out of the question. Nicole and her husband were already missing work, however, because of the demands of the unviable pregnancy she was forced to carry to term.

Her condition, she says, was “on the edge of death.”

“I had to be at home, on bed rest, in pain,” she tells The Independent. “I was in so much pain, my husband had to assist me even going to the bathroom … I couldn’t sit down or even lift myself up.

“I felt like nothing,” she continues. “It was so outrageous to just go to our doctor’s office and just get monitored, and the doctors know everything you’re going through, and all they can do is just sit up there and just give you the monitor, check your heart rate or check your pressure, and then you know, just, ‘Okay, Ms Blackmon, we’ll see you next time — call us if you need anything or if anything changes.’

“But if I call you, if anything changes or if I go to the hospital, it’s still not going to change the fact that I’m still unable to get the help that is needed.”

Nicole went into labor at 31 weeks, in December 2022.

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“When I woke up that morning and found that the water had broken … my mind was blank,” she says. “My mind was blank even in the hospital, and I was in labor for 32 hours — that’s how complicated the situation was.”

As the shift changed on her and the hours counted by, she was flooded with complex emotions.

“In a way, I was relieved I made it to labor; I was at the point where I made it to almost the end of the road where I did survive … I was relieved that I did survive to that point without dying,” she says. “But it also hit me, knowing that I was going to give birth to a child that wasn’t going to live.

“I did ask the nurse to put a sheet in between me and her, so when I did [go into] labor I wouldn’t see the dead baby coming out,” Nicole says. “I knew, mentally, I couldn’t handle that after just losing a child, and also I didn’t want to. I made a decision not to see my baby … I knew that it would have torn me apart.

“I wanted to hold my child, but I knew that it would have been my breaking and cracking point.”

Her mental, physical and emotional recovery is ongoing, and Nicole has since undergone a tubal ligation — a surgical procedure that blocks or removes the fallopian tubes. Despite her wish for another child, the toll on her body would be too great.

Now, she is determined to hold the state accountable, so that no other pregnant patient suffers a similar nightmare.

“I’m not an angry person, so I don’t feel anger,” she says. “I do feel let down by the healthcare field. I do feel let down by the law, which put the healthcare field in a bind to not be able to treat their patients the way they should.”

She feels strengthened by Daniel and her faith, she tells The Independent — even though the upcoming holidays, as well as her late son’s birthday in November and the anniversary of Ethan’s stillbirth in December, will be particularly difficult.

“I have continued to fight and move my feet because my son and God told me I can get through this,” she says. “No matter how many times I have to tell it, I will continue to tell my story, if it helps the outcome … I will continue to move my feet.”