Woman Denied Emergency Abortion in Ohio Filled Diapers With Blood, Almost Died
Christina Zielke told NPR she “was passing blood clots the size of golf balls," but doctors said she “needed to prove there was no fetal development."
AbortionPolitics

Last week, an Ohio woman wrote a letter to the editor to her local paper about her daughter being denied an emergency abortion amid a miscarriage, putting her life at risk. The letter drew national attention after being featured in Jessica Valenti’s Abortion, Every Day newsletter, which shared new, gutting developments in the woman’s story on Tuesday.
Christina Zielke told her story to NPR on Tuesday. The Washington, D.C., resident learned she was pregnant in July, and weeks later learned the fetus had no heartbeat and that her pregnancy hormone levels were dropping. It was clear the pregnancy wasn’t viable, and her options, her doctor told her, were to take medication to end the pregnancy more quickly, have a dilation and curettage (D&C) abortion procedure to remove the pregnancy tissue, or wait to naturally lose the pregnancy. According to Zielke, her doctor recommended the last option. Weeks later, her natural bleeding still hadn’t begun, but Zielke felt reassured after reading online that it can take some pregnant people longer than others to miscarry. Then, over Labor Day weekend in September, Zielke and her husband traveled to Ohio for a wedding.
Zielke’s bleeding began on the drive to the wedding. She thought she’d miscarried and that that was the last of it, but the next night, the bleeding returned and worsened. Zielke told NPR she “was passing blood clots the size of golf balls.” She recalled filling the bathtub of her parents’ Ohio house with blood in the middle of the night and then waking up in the emergency room of TriPoint Medical Center.
As different medical staff visited and ran tests on Zielke, she continued to bleed nonstop, filling entire diapers with blood, but was told her blood tests didn’t show significant blood loss. She said she heard a nurse at one point say a D&C is sometimes needed to stop heavy bleeding, but no one offered her this procedure. Two-and-a-half hours later, she was discharged from the emergency room; Zielke and her husband, Greg Holeyman, objected to this, but Zielke says they were told that doctors “needed to prove there was no fetal development”—or that the fetus really was dead—for them to offer a D&C, and told her to “come back in two days for a repeat hormone test to confirm I was miscarrying.”