Anna Nusslock was fifteen weeks pregnant with twin girls when her water broke. She was bleeding. She was in pain. And when she and her husband Daniel got to Providence St. Joseph Hospital in Eureka on February 23, a doctor confirmed what she already feared — the twins would not survive.
What happened next is the reason California’s attorney general is now suing the hospital.
Doctors diagnosed Nusslock with previable premature rupture of membranes, a condition that left her at serious risk of hemorrhage and infection.
The standard treatment is to end the pregnancy. Instead, according to a lawsuit filed Monday by Attorney General Rob Bonta in Humboldt County Superior Court, Providence told her its policy forbade the procedure as long as one of the twins still had a detectable heartbeat.
The hospital would step in only once she was close enough to dying to qualify.
So they sent her home. Or rather, they sent her down the highway — nearly 12 miles to Mad River Community Hospital, a small critical access facility.
On the way out the door, staff handed her a bucket and towels, the complaint says, in case something happened in the car.
By the time she reached the operating table at Mad River, she was actively hemorrhaging.
“Abortion Care is Healthcare”
Bonta announced the suit at a Sacramento press conference with Nusslock standing beside him.
“It is damning that here in California, where abortion care is a constitutional right, we have a hospital implementing a policy that’s reminiscent of heartbeat laws in extremist red states,” Bonta said.
He called the hospital’s rules draconian and said his office would use its full force to hold Providence accountable.
The complaint alleges Providence violated three California laws: the Emergency Services Law, the state’s counterpart to the federal EMTALA statute; the Unruh Civil Rights Act; and the Unfair Competition Law.
Bonta also moved immediately for a preliminary injunction, asking a judge to order the hospital to provide emergency abortion care while the case plays out.
In a statement posted to Facebook, Providence called Nusslock’s experience a tragic situation.
The hospital, part of a large Catholic health system, operates under the Ethical and Religious Directives issued by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops — a set of rules that restricts what care Catholic facilities may provide regardless of what a patient’s doctor recommends.
She Wasn’t the Only One
Nusslock’s case is not a one-off. According to the complaint, one to two women a year end up receiving abortion care at Mad River after Providence turned them away.
All of them, the filing says, were discharged and told to go somewhere else.
Bonta said his office is now looking at how common this is across the state.
That question matters a great deal in California, where Catholic systems control a substantial share of hospital beds and, in many rural counties, are the only option within a reasonable drive.
Update:
Humboldt County is about to become one of those places. Mad River — the hospital that actually treated Nusslock — is closing its labor and delivery unit this month.
When it does, Providence will be the only hospital in the entire county with an L&D unit.
Read that again. The next woman who walks into an emergency room in Humboldt County bleeding through a nonviable pregnancy will have two options: get in a car for a drive of several hours, or wait in a hospital bed until she is sick enough to satisfy someone else’s religious policy.
The Federal Backstop That Isn’t There
None of this should be a state-law problem. Under EMTALA, every hospital with an emergency department that takes Medicare must stabilize any patient with an emergency medical condition.
After the Supreme Court overturned Roe in Dobbs, EMTALA was supposed to be the floor no state could dig beneath.
Then came Idaho v. United States this past summer. The justices dismissed the case as improvidently granted, sending it back down without deciding whether EMTALA actually requires hospitals to provide emergency abortions when state law says otherwise.
The question is still open. Pregnant patients are the ones living inside that uncertainty.
Which is why Bonta is using California statutes instead of waiting on Washington. “You have the right to access timely and safe abortion services,” he said.
What This Case Is Really About
There is a version of this story that gets told as a legal dispute — competing statutes, religious directives, the reach of a federal law.
That version is accurate and beside the point.
A woman came to a hospital losing a pregnancy she wanted, facing infection and blood loss, and the institution that existed to treat her instead calculated whether she was dying fast enough.
Then it gave her a bucket.
Nusslock has said she told the staff she didn’t want to die. She had to say it out loud, to medical professionals, in a state that writes abortion rights into its constitution.
California DOJ is asking anyone denied emergency abortion care — or any other emergency care — to contact abortion.access@doj.ca.gov.
Resources on reproductive care in the state are available at abortion.ca.gov, which does not track or store visitor information.
