I Had To Seek Emergency Women's Healthcare In Texas And New York. The Experience In Texas Terrified Me For The Future Of America.

On a Friday evening this summer, I found myself in the emergency room. I’d been bleeding nonstop for five days and worried I was hemorrhaging. My anxiety was amplified by my location: I live in Texas. Was it an ectopic pregnancy? Should I get into the car and drive nine hours straight through to New Mexico? On a roadtrip west last year, I’d looked up at the billboards right over the state border from Texas: Welcome to New Mexico: Our rights are safe. Abortion care is legal.

That Friday afternoon, after calling my doctor’s office and explaining my situation to a nurse, I decided to go to the emergency room. At the hospital, I was swiftly brought to a private room where the Discovery Channel was airing real-life shark attack stories. A sign posted in the room where I sat stated in Spanish and English: “No one, including your family, may force or coerce you into having an abortion.” The sign struck me as unnecessary at best and deceptive at worst: Who could be forced into an abortion when those who desperately wanted or needed care couldn’t access it? That in fact, women in the state were dying because of the abortion ban.

During the pandemic, the governor of Texas took the opportunity to curtail abortion rights, when he couldn’t be bothered to install a mask mandate. In 2021, Texas beat the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs ruling to the punch and passed a so-called "heartbeat ban" which prohibits abortion after six weeks, before many women know they’re pregnant. The “heartbeat” in this case is actually a fallacy, as a fetus’s heartbeat does not develop until 10 weeks. Since that ruling, pregnant patients in turmoil have to leave the state for care — if they can. Texas doctors fear legal repercussions if they even tell their patients to leave the state, speaking in code: “It’s nice this time of year in Colorado.”

A nurse drew blood from my hand, and as I bled through my bike shorts onto the paper sheet on the hospital bed, I watched victims of shark bites relate how much blood they’d lost to great whites — I knew how they felt. When the doctor came in, she wondered what I was doing there since I’d only been bleeding heavily for five days. She told me to call my doctor on Monday and sent me home.

I like my doctor. Her nails are painted with bright designs, and at my first visit, she said we’d have to start mammograms next year and followed with, “That doesn’t mean you’re old.” But when she’d asked, “Any miscarriages, any abortions?” I imagined a Texas state trooper waiting outside the door like a dogcatcher, ready to burst in with a net if I answered yes. “No,” I answered quietly.

When I contacted her after the ER visit, she prescribed the Pill and told me to check in at the end of the month. I was desperate to stop bleeding, and within a few days, I did.

A few weeks later, I flew to New York to see my sister for a long weekend. We drank rosé in her hot fourth-floor Brooklyn apartment, took the ferry to Rockaway Beach, and rode bikes to Red Hook. On Monday morning, I sailed through security at JFK. I’d started my period the day before and was still cramping. My gate was the very last one in the terminal, and as I made my way toward it, my cramps sharply intensified, the long hallway extending infinitely before me. I stopped in one bathroom and then another, hunched over on the toilet, praying for relief. I’d taken two Aleve since I’d woken up that morning, but the pain was only getting worse, and gate B55 still seemed miles away. I felt like Wile E. Coyote crawling through the flat Warner Bros. desert on the brink of death. Even if I did manage to make it to my seat on the plane, I worried, would something happen when we were in the air?

I felt closer to passing out with each moment: I was sweating, my legs wobbled, and my uterus felt like it was being clamped with a wrench, yanked, and then twisted. I stopped at a gate and started fanning myself with my hardcover book, wondering who and when to ask for help. I stopped in a third bathroom and sat on the toilet. I remembered hearing stories of people having miscarriages in mall bathrooms, teens who didn’t know they were pregnant to begin with — but I couldn’t be having a miscarriage! I’d been on birth control for a month! I was 38, not a teenager!

I was doubled over in the bathroom, feeling like something had to come out of me to be granted relief. But what? I conceded I was not making this plane and I needed help. I asked the bathroom attendant: “Is there a doctor anywhere?” She left and returned with a security guard. “Are you ok?” he asked as he approached me.

“Well, no. I’m in a lot of pain.”

“What kind of pain?”

“Menstrual cramps. The worst of my life. I can’t walk.”

“Are you on any medication or drugs?”

“No.”

“Ok, we’re going to get you help.”He got on his walkie-talkie while a woman who worked for the airport brought me orange juice. What I needed was a military-grade narcotic, but maybe some sugar would help. Twenty minutes later, a police officer showed up and asked me the same set of questions as the security guard.

“Ok, we’re going to get you help,” he said. “Have you ever had kidney stones?”

“No.”

“I think that’s what it is. Probably kidney stones.”

Forty-five minutes later, a pair of EMTs came with a stretcher. They loaded me and my luggage onto it after asking me the same questions. In the back of the ambulance on the way to Jamaica Hospital, an EMT gave me two ice packs and took my insurance card.

As I entered general GYN at Jamaica, I placed my luggage on the empty seat in the busy waiting area and crouched against the wall, gripping the warming ice packs like a baby blanket: a semblance of comfort. The other women were in hospital gowns, hooked up to IVs, quietly chatting. Kids, spotting during pregnancy, unplanned late pregnancies, why was it taking so long to be seen by a doctor?

One hour passed. Two hours passed. I hunched on the wall over my room-temperature ice packs. The women cycled out of the chairs, replaced by newer emergencies. A sign was posted above a whiteboard with the names of the staff on shift. It reassured patients that they had the right to complete and comprehensive delivery care in any situation or outcome. In New York, the state law specifies that “People of all ages have the absolute right to abortion through the 24th week of pregnancy. After 24 weeks, abortion is permitted if your medical provider decides your fetus is not viable, or your life, physical health, or mental health is at risk.”

I thought of the difference in the signage posted in the two emergency rooms I’d been in: one purporting to protect women and girls against a threat that didn’t exist and one reassuring pregnant people that they would have access to whatever care their circumstances warranted.

Jamaica Hospital was overcrowded, but the fact that the state protected the women in it was an unquantifiable measure of wealth absent from the emergency room in Austin. In Queens, I knew that no matter what was wrong with me, the law wouldn’t prohibit me from getting whatever care I needed.

The great irony of this situation is that according to a University of Texas poll, 85% of Texans support abortion in the event that the woman’s life is in danger. Texas will likely not put abortion up for a vote, as it has won in almost every state where it has been on the ballot.

Ten hours after I arrived, and a dose of intravenous Toradol, a CT scan, and an intravaginal ultrasound later, I was free to go. The ultrasound showed fibroids and a cyst, and I needed to promptly follow up with my doctor. My sister made us a late dinner in her apartment, and I went to bed anxious that the blinding pain would come roaring back. The next day, I expelled a mass of flesh, and the pain passed. Was it a fibroid?

Back in Austin, I checked in with my doctor, who suggested that my extreme pain and the mass that followed was a decidual cast: the shedding of uterine lining all at once, which passes through the cervix, causing extreme pain. This is rare but can occur for new users of birth control.

The dissolution of Roe by the conservative majority on the Supreme Court has caused untold suffering and uncertainty for women all over America: from preventable deaths to irreversible harm to their reproductive systems when vital care is outlawed. Both Trump and Vance have equivocated between leaving abortion law up to the states and a “national standard” that would amount to a ban. In July 2024, Senate Republicans blocked a bill to protect the right to travel out of state for an abortion.

So what does leaving abortion care up to the states really mean? It means either safety or fear in an emergency room. Abortion bans, or the prospect of leaving abortion up to the states, means death for American women.Emily May is an essayist and visual artist based in Austin, Texas. She studied environmental philosophy at the University of Vermont, and has been a resident at the Vermont Studio Center and the Mineral School. She has been published in Cagibi Lit, Entropy, espnW, and other venues. Emily's debut collection of essays Some Girls will be published by Galileo Press in 2025.Do you have a personal story you’d like to see published on BuzzFeed? Send us a pitch at essay-pitch@buzzfeed.com.