When Project 2025 staffer and former Trump White House personnel chief John McEntee tried to score points on social media on Thursday by denying that women were “bleeding out” due to abortion bans, he probably didn’t expect them to reply to him directly.
“Can someone track down the women Kamala Harris said are bleeding out in parking lots because Roe v. Wade was overturned?” McEntee asked in a TikTok video filmed at a restaurant as he dipped fried food into sauce.
“Don’t hold your breath,” he added, smirking.
“I’m right here,” replied Carmen Broesder, a mother living in Idaho, which enacted a trigger law after the fall of Roe, a making it a felony for doctors to provide an abortion unless it was necessary “to prevent the death of the pregnant woman.”
In a TikTok video of her own, Broesder recalled how hospital staff turned her away from the ER three times during an excruciating 19-day miscarriage. She said she was repeatedly denied a procedure to remove tissue from the uterus—a procedure known as dilation and curettage (D&C) that is also used in abortions—and that they gave her just one dose of pain medication in 19 days. “I blacked out in my hallway due to blood loss,” she recounted.
In June, the Supreme Court gave Idaho hospitals the green light to perform emergency abortions to protect pregnant people’s health, as well as their life—but the ruling is temporary while the lower courts reconsider the issue. But the problem isn’t confined to Idaho. In Oklahoma, Jaci Statton developed heavy bleeding, dizziness, and weakness from a molar pregnancy, a condition in which a fertilized egg does not develop into a fetus. For more than a week, she told NPR, doctors denied her treatment, and she was transferred to three different hospitals. Ultimately, she had to drive three hours to an abortion clinic in Kansas to get an D&C.
“The record shows that, as a matter of medical reality, such cases exist,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote in a concurring opinion in the Idaho case. “Hospitals in Idaho have had to airlift medically fragile women to other States to receive abortions needed to prevent serious harms to their health. Those transfers measure the difference between the life-threatening conditions Idaho will allow hospitals to treat and the health-threatening conditions it will not.”
“I was told when I had a possible ectopic pregnancy that I would have to ‘wait until it made me septic’ to get the surgery to save my life.”
According to Rolling Stone, Broesder’s severe blood loss during her miscarriage caused erratic blood pressure and a stress response that led her to be diagnosed with a heart condition she said could lead to a heart attack if she gets too excited or upset. “I have to deal with these side effects for the rest of my life because of abortion laws,” Broesder said in her video.
Broesder’s experience is a clear illustration of what Vice President Kamala Harris was talking about when she responded to former president Donald Trump’s bizarre claim during the debate that “every legal scholar” wanted Roe v. Wade overturned. “Pregnant women who want to carry a pregnancy to term, suffering from a miscarriage, being denied care in an emergency room because the health care providers are afraid they might go to jail, and she is bleeding out in a car in the parking lot—she didn’t want that,” Harris said. “Her husband didn’t want that.”
McEntee, the founder of a conservative-only dating app, has a large following on TikTok, where he posts snarky and often offensive quips about race and gender designed to tickle his MAGA audience. But his video garnered thousands of first-person responses, many telling stories about severe medical complications after pregnant people were denied care.
“I was told when I had a possible ectopic pregnancy that I would have to ‘wait until it made me septic’ to get the surgery to save my life,” one commenter said.
“My daughter. Nearly lost her life after she miscarried triplets that didn’t expel her body & 3 hospitals wouldn’t remove them,” another replied.
“I’ve been anemic on and off since my weeks-long miscarriage,” wrote yet another commenter. “Three hospitals refused to give me a DNC or pill protocol. Unimaginable pain and distress.”
And so it goes, on and on, for more than 19,000 comments as of Saturday.
