This account is one of the most heartbreaking examples of the consequences of the Republican Party's War on Women! I will try to give a written overview. I just finished writing a very lengthy and well documented diary that was very time and energy consuming. So please bear with me. This is something you must watch/hear/read about to believe because it should be impossible in the United States in 2024.
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Rick starts off with his typical candor, saying, "Folks this is a tough show!"
He is clearly emotional and it is seen and heard. He takes out a long breath. "I am recording this a little after we recorded the show and I'm a little shook to be honest with you. I'm emotional. I'm 😡 angry! " He swallows hard and breathes out again. He shakes his head. He continues, "The story you're about to hear is (takes off glasses and wipes face) of Ryan Hamilton and his wife.
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And the fact that the state of Texas caused her even though her child had died to be tortured for 96 hours based on their abortion bans in the state and the lavish insane cruelty of those bans, they are not pro-life. They are not small government, they are not in any way you could imagine and they're backed up by an army of online hate that we will talk about towards the end of this segment that has left me absolutely livid. It's a tough show. Don't listen to this with your kids. It's hard. It's very very difficult to hear, but I want you to hear it because Ryan Hamilton's story is important. It speaks to where our country is headed and headed fast in a lot of states that have decided that women don't have rights at all and I say this as somebody who believes that abortion is a morally complicated and terrible issue. I say this as someone who treasures life, but I say this also as someone who when you watch the hand of government with the corporate medical establishment play out in this story if you're not as disgusted and angry as I am I will be shocked. It's not easy to listen to. But with that, let's go with our friend Ryan Hamilton. Thanks."
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Rick Wilson , "Hi folks and welcome back to the Lincoln Project podcast. Our guest today is Ryan Hamilton and you may have heard Ryan and his wife's story. They live in rural Texas and a few months ago, Ryan's wife got some very tragic news, their child that they desperately wanted no longer had a heart beat. and Ryan's story and the story of his wife played out in the state of Texas unfortunately where because of the change in the laws there and because of the change in the post Dobbs environment the restrictions on women receiving life-saving healthcare have become so onerous and so punitive that his wife had to suffer through excruciating days of pain and fear and terror and Ryan had told his story in such an eloquent way and I'm so grateful Ryan for you coming on the show today because I think our audience needs to hear a little bit about what's at stake as we move forward and your story and your wife's story and your family story is one that moved me profoundly. And I wanted to have you on because I think your voice and your experience is really important so thank you for coming on the podcast and if you could better than I can, tell us the story and then we want, I want to dive into the different parts of it and talk about the future. "
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I will keep adding to this, but captions are available. I greatly appreciate your patience as I work on this transcript. Thank you!
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Ryan, "No problem. Thank you for having me! First of all as I've said a few times this is the last thing I thought I would be doing ."
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Rick, "I'm sure."
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Ryan, "But I'm here and I'm going to do my best and that may be the first time somebody's called me eloquent, so thank you very much. I appreciate that. Yeah so, God, several weeks ago it was a Thursday, my wife was almost 13 weeks pregnant with our second child she just made a comment in passing, 'I don't feel right, something doesn't feel right.' and that just kind of rings alarm bells for any couple.
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Not long after that she had severe abdominal pain and then she started bleeding and we went to, we live like you said in a rural part of Texas , so we only have two options. We have the big scary hospital or an emergency clinic and in that situation, the calmer environment of an emergency clinic felt better, so that's what we did and it was closer. So we went to the emergency clinic and there they examined her and found that out baby no longer had a heart beat and they also discovered that it had actually stopped growing and it's heart had probably stopped a week or so prior which made it even more urgent because my wife could develop sepsis, the risk of infection skyrockets.
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They tell us that we have two options. There's a D&C which something we learned about, I mean we had kind of heard about it and the way other people hear about it these stories in the news, but you're not really familiar or a drug called misoprostol. They said that they didn't do , wouldn't do the D&C there and suggested the misoprostol which they would write us a prescription for and send us home. That to us was really concerning because first of all why are they giving us an option that they can't or won't do and secondly why would we ever go home to handle this ourselves? And that's what the doctor did and in that moment we're looking to the doctor to tell us what to do .
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We're devastated by that news and we want the doctor to tell us that this is what you should do now and that's what they did, they wrote us a prescription for misoprostol and sent us home and the pharmacy didn't open until the next morning, so we had to go home and go to bed and try to sleep with that knowledge and with the baby still inside of my wife and and nobody slept. She cried all night! And the next morning, Friday morning I was at the pharmacy first thing to try and get the prescription.
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After we left, we did a little research that Thursday night just because you're in the middle of it. You want to understand and just like a lot of people you get on your phone and you want to see what is this drug, what are we getting ourselves into and we learned that not every pharmacy will even fill a prescription for misoprostol in Texas because it's referred to as 'the abortion pill'. We got lucky. I found a pharmacy with an all female staff and they filled the prescription. And when they filled the prescription, the pharmacist held my hand. It was odd, but I remember her grabbing my hand and just looking at me like, she was trying to comfort me just tell me like , it's okay, I don't know. I was either looking a certain way that made her do that or she knew that we couldn't get that drug anywhere else.
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So I go home that Friday morning with the prescription and we start and the instructions on the prescription are one sentence, 'Insert vaginally, wait 4 to 6 hours, and repeat. ' and that's it. Those are the only instructions. I thought they had forgotten to give us more information or pamphlet or book or something. I think a lot of people think it's a pill you take orally or you swallow. They don't realize that it's administered in the most intrusive awkward way and it's multiple pills. So we start that and it starts to go wrong pretty quick. What it does is it induces labor essentially.
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So we have a 9 month old, now a 10 month old daughter. So, I'm in the living room with our daughter. My wife is in the bedroom and our bathroom, we have the doors open so we can communicate back and forth about what's going on. So, I l'm trying to keep a happy face for our little girl in the living room. She starts and she starts saying pretty quick, 'Something isn't right. I don't think this is right.' She had been bleeding since Thursday night. Now she's bleeding profusely because of this drug and we called the Emergency Center back and said, 'We don't think this is right. Something feels very wrong about this. They asked us what color the blood was. And we said, 'It's red; it's bright red.' and they said it should be brown. If it's not brown blood, then something is wrong and as morbid as that sounds, I want people to hear that part because that became our focus, the color of the blood.
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And she's in the bathroom, I'm in the living room with our little girl and that's the conversation back and forth for hours and hours.' Is it still bright red? Is it brown blood? It's still bright red.' We have one refill on the prescription. We reached the end of the first dose. It's terrifying to go through it. It's not working. The blood is apparently the wrong color. So I go to the pharmacy, make sure I get there before they close and they give us the refill , the last refill on that prescription. And we start over again Friday night and that goes all the way through the night, it gets us to Saturday morning. Still bright red blood. She's still bleeding profusely. Saturday morning we call the Emergency Center again, 'Hey, this is not working. What do we need to do? Well, we can write you another prescription, but you have to come back in and get rechecked.
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And so we went back on the Saturday morning to the Emergency Center. They take my wife back. The nurse does the usual thing , checks her, checks her blood pressure, does all of the things they have her chart from Thursday night. They know what happened. There is another doctor on call. You can hear him from his desk. He was sitting at his desk and he said, 'I'm not giving her a pill so she can go home and have an abortion!' And I don't know if he knew she could hear him say that or not, but he collected himself I guess and then directly to my wife said, 'Considering the current stance, I'm not going to prescribe you this medicine. ' End of doctor's appointment! Not but let's do a D&C immediately because this is clearly going wrong. Just the end of doctor's appointment. Aand the nurse you could tell she wanted to do something. The nurse could not believe it and my wife becomes hysterical, of course, because what option did they , what they gave us no option. They just sent her on her way crying with our baby inside of her and no more medicine . So we kind of have to collect ourselves, our daughter's still with us in the car seat.
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We're in the truck. We're trying to get it together. We know there's a hospital an hour away. It's where our daughter was born . We called. They said, 'Come in immediately!' We went. They took her right back. I stayed in the truck with our daughter and my wife and I were on FaceTime cuz we wanted to shield our little girl from as much of this as possible. So I'm in the truck just trying to say, 'We're on an adventure. Everything's okay.' and that balances hard for both of us because, well, for reasons I'm sure you understand. They take her back and she has to start all over again with the examination. They have to do a new scan. They have to reconfirm that the baby has no heartbeat. They are asking her all the same questions over again and they do their examination. They determine the same thing. They know she's two rounds of misoprostol in. She's bleeding through several pads over several hours. She started bleeding Thursday night. Now it's Saturday mid morning and after they do the examination and determine what we already know, plus they have the information of her taking the misoprostol twice. THEY JUST DISAPPEARED FOR HOURS ONLY TO COME BACK IN OCCASIONALLY AND AAK SOME QUESTION THAT THEY'VE ALREADY ASKED. JUST ' HEY YOU DOING OKAY?' It was odd and they finally come back in, the doctor, and they decided that it was not enough of an emergency to perform a D&C and for people that don't know what a D&C is, it's a procedure to get the baby out. Abortion is what is done. D&C is how it's done, essentially. So, what they told us is that my wife was not close enough to dying (he struggles because of emotions overtaking him). Sorry Rick, I just can't, I try and tell this and just tell it and it's hard."
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Rick says, "Ryan, I'm here for you brother."
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Ryan continues, " (shakes head) They decide it's not enough of an emergency and they're going to do us a favor and give us one more round of misoprostol, but this time much stronger with no refills . They say if we decide we want a D&C, maybe they can schedule one for a week or two later. "
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Rick says, "Oh Christ!"
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Ryan returns, "And that's where they get away with it because technically they offered. On the discharge paperwork on the hospital, it recommends we go see our OB . Anybody who has an OB , you know you can't get an appointment immediately. I don't understand how they have this information, they know my wife could get an infection or sepsis and die and they just want to delay it, but technically offer and they just sent us back home. And we went back home on Saturday and start it all over again. This time. Though, it's still one sentence, but the instructions are different. It says, 'insert vaginally, wait, ' I believe it was ' 8 to 10 hours repeat. So we go home and we start again. I'm in the living room with our daughter. My wife no longer has the strength to go from the bed to the bathroom . She had developed this routine, lay down in bed until it got too bad, get up, go sit on the toilet which is what you have to do and go back and forth. She's no longer strong enough to do that. So she just stays in the bathroom and lays down and she asked me to bring her a heating blanket and a pillow and that was the first like hold on s second moment for me because when I went in the bathroom and she was laying in the floor of the bathroom and I'm wrapping her in this heating blanket, she was ice cold and she was clammy like sticky. And I had to lift her head up and put it on the pillow. I put some towels and I remember walking back into the living room and it was the first time I had the thought like , 'Is she going to die?' what is the level of what's happening. So that gets us through to Sunday morning. She started bleeding Thursday night. We're into Sunday now. "
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Rick interjects, "Jesus Christ!"
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Ryan continues, "So, we haven't slept, she's been bleeding profusely for over 48 hours. She's in the bathroom, just on the floor with barely enough strength to get up on the toilet and then lay back down and we started just kind of this awful routine this Sunday morning I get up. Routine's important for a 9 month old little girl, so I'm feeding her breakfast, trying to do the normal things. I had a missed call on my phone. My wife was no longer strong enough to yell at me from the other room, so she had started calling me if she needed me and I had a missed call because I was taking care of our little girl and when I saw it, I went into the, I set our daughter in her playpen, went into the bedroom and then into the bathroom and she had fallen off of the toilet and she was unconscious and there was blood from the toilet seat down into the floor. She had fallen in a really awkward position, in a position where you know something that's very wrong and I just started yelling. "
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Ryan, "It was out of body, you know, 'Are you okay? Can you hear me?' all of those things. So, I picked her up and put her back on the toilet. It's so disgusting to me that so much of this happens there and I dressed her and carried her into the living room, still unconscious, put our daughter in the car seat, put my daughter in the truck, came back in, got my wife, still unconscious, carried her to the truck. I wasn't calling an ambulance. We didn't trust any of these people. I was not waiting. Some people think this is very irresponsible of me but my wife is alive. So, I hate to argue with them, but I drove my wife to the hospital, our only other option than that first emergency clinic where that guy cited the current stance, we're not going back there, got her to the hospital, ran in, said, ' my wife is unconscious, she's bleeding. ' They came out. I helped her . I helped them get her out of the truck onto the cart. And they took her back and they said, 'Thank God you brought her when you did! "
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Rick covers mouth, clearly grieved and overcome by emotion.
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Ryan, " And it's the only time they didn't hesitate because she was finally close enough to dead that they had to help and they saved her, they gave her the fluids that she needed. They said that she had lost a ton of blood, she was severely dehydrated and they wanted to keep her longer but she didn't want to be poked and prodded anymore. And we left the hospital that same day, later that day. "
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Rick, "They still weren't offering to do the D&C at that point."
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Ryan, "Correct. So. They were able to confirm that the baby was no longer with her. That though, now that we've gotten through it and learned what we've learned, there's still things, there's still things that can be left that cause infection, so why they didn't go, 'let's maybe check, let's I don't know but they didn't offer but they did confirm the baby was no longer with her so and I love the argument from these people online, "Oh, so the medicine worked!' "