Laura Campbell chose to have an abortion after suffering devastating complications during her pregnancy. Now she wants to make sure all other Nevada women have that same choice.
This story was originally published by The Nevadan, which is owned by Courier Newsroom.
When Laura Campbell was 27 weeks pregnant, she received heartbreaking news at an ultrasound checkup: Her much-wanted baby no longer had a heartbeat.
Campbell, who already had one child, was stunned. Her pregnancy had been healthy and uneventful until that moment.
“I remember my doctor sitting next to me and holding my hand, telling me that everything was going to be all right and that I was going to be taken care of,” Campbell, now 34, told The Nevadan. “He let me go home to reflect upon everything and talk with my husband. You have my phone number if you need to talk to me. I’m on call.”
Campbell was devastated that the baby boy that she had already named Michael was gone. She wanted to call her mom and get home to her husband, Spencer, and their then-2-year-old boy, Keith.
“I just lay on the couch in the fetal position and my mom came over and was holding me,” she said, tearing up.
The couple decided that they would go back to the hospital the next morning to induce labor for their stillborn baby, but suddenly, around 9 p.m. that evening, Campbell began to go into heavy labor.
“We got right in the car. Luckily my son was now at my in-laws’ place and we rushed to the hospital which was about 10 minutes away. We were rushing,” Campbell said. “I remember feeling like this baby’s coming and we were scared that we were going to have Michael in the car but he wasn’t going to be alive.”
“At the hospital, they raced me in a wheelchair through the maternity ward,” she continued. “My husband was saying, ‘My wife is going to have this baby that we’re losing’ and they rushed me into a room. I barely made it onto the bed and I could feel him come out of me and the nurse caught him.”
The nurse wrapped Michael’s body up in a blanket.
“I didn’t want to see him. I had a vision in my head of what he looked like—I guess I don’t look at open casket funerals. I refuse to because I don’t want to remember someone like that,” Campbell said. “I had a vision of what Michael looked like in my head and I didn’t want to let that go.”
Agonizingly for Campbell, she was sent to the maternity ward after her stillbirth. “They didn’t really have anywhere to put me.”
She convinced the doctor to release her from the hospital the next morning, but going home was also full of pain. “Going home without a baby because he isn’t alive is very traumatizing. Very traumatizing.”
Nevertheless, Campbell is still full of praise for the nurse and the OB-GYN who cared for her during the emergency delivery of her stillborn baby.
“I just remember that she [the nurse] hugged me and made sure I was OK. I remember her taking care of both me and my husband because it’s not like we had been through this before,” Campbell said.
Campbell’s traumatizing experience is one of the reasons that she knew that she would be 100 percent on board with helping the effort by the organization Nevadans for Reproductive Freedom to place an abortion rights ballot measure on the November ballot.
While Nevadans voted to codify abortion up to 24 weeks in 1990, the ballot initiative in November will ask voters whether they want that same protection to be included in the state Constitution. The current protections can be changed with another referendum vote, but amending the state’s Constitution would make it more difficult to pass abortion bans or restrictions in the future.
The proposed language of the ballot measure also states that individuals or any healthcare provider “who acts consistent with the applicable scope and practice of providing reproductive health care services” cannot be penalized or prosecuted.
If the amendment receives 51 percent support from voters who come to the polls in November, it will be placed on the ballot again in November 2026. If it passes again then, it will make it into Nevada’s Constitution.
Campbell had already been a board member and director of actions for Nevada Now, a women’s rights group, after her own arduous pregnancy experiences. But she was determined to volunteer to help gather signatures for the petition drive to place the abortion amendment on the Nevada ballot. Part of that meant sharing her story publicly to help “normalize’ the need for abortion.
Campbell also wanted to speak out about the critical need for the state’s women to not just have access to abortion, but also to top medical care when a pregnancy goes wrong and leads to serious complications, including miscarriages and stillbirths.
When Campbell experienced the horror of stillbirth, her pain was eased by the emotional and physical care she received from her doctor and nurse.
“My life was a priority for them,” she said. “Even though I wasn’t OK, they were at least going to make sure that I would be OK to be there for my son, who needed a mother.”
“And it just makes me sad and mad that not everybody gets that … because of where they live and it’s not fair. There are nurses out there who can’t do that for their patients because they could be prosecuted,” she continued.
“It breaks my heart because what I went through is so f**cking horrible.”
“This is not what you want to call the land of the free. That’s not the land of the free,” Campbell added.
Campbell is referring to the many incidents in the 22 states where abortion is banned or heavily restricted in which women have been turned away from hospitals when they are bleeding and miscarrying. In many cases, doctors were afraid to treat the women due to the severe criminal penalties they could be slapped with if they provide health saving medical aid before a woman is at risk of dying.
My life was a priority for them. Even though I wasn’t OK, they were at least going to make sure that I would be OK to be there for my son, who needed a mother.
Laura Campbell
Anya Cook, for example, was sent away from a Miami hospital during a miscarriage and delivered her fetus when she was on the toilet in a hair salon, ultimately losing half of the blood in her body that day.
Campbell also fears that under the draconian red-state bans that criminalize pregnancy, there will be more women like Ohio resident Brittany Watts, who was sent home from hospitals while miscarrying and was later charged with the crime of ‘abuse of a corpse’ after she passed her 22-week-old dead fetus in her toilet at home.
The charges were ultimately dropped after a grand jury refused to indict Watts.
“I couldn’t stop my body when it was ‘aborting’ my baby,” Campbell said. “My body was doing what it was supposed to do to protect me… And it’s like, would I have been prosecuted for that?”
Campbell calls the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade, “the guttiest of gut punches” and is convinced that if Donald Trump is elected, he will “try to put a national abortion ban” in place.
“It’s giving me chills just thinking about it.”
A History of Difficult Pregnancies and Complications
Campbell, who married her “best friend” and high school sweetheart at the age of 20, feels very strongly that the government has no business forcing women to give birth.
“Those politicians who are making these laws… they don’t know how it feels.”
She believes that everybody deserves to decide if, when and how their family is made. “It’s a decision that the person gets to make themselves,” she said.
It’s a point of view that was reinforced in recent years. In addition to her stillbirth, Campbell suffered an early miscarriage at 26, when she and Spencer were ready to start a family; a terrifying C-Section birth of her son Keith, which deprived him of oxygen; and preeclampsia when she was pregnant with her daughter, Lily, a pregnancy which also saw her hospitalized after her water broke early at 27 weeks, ultimately leading to C-section at 30 weeks to deliver Lily.
“I honestly thought… I’m going to lose my baby again,” Campbell said.
Lily was small, but healthy when she was delivered and ultimately spent two months in the NICU. \
Following the trauma of this pregnancy and Lily’s premature birth, Campbell decided to have her tubes tied.
“I know my history, I know my body and clearly my body does not [like] being pregnant,” she said.
But even after she got her tubes tied, Campbell somehow became pregnant again.
“When I saw the positive pregnancy test, I was like I’m not going to go through with this. I’m not going to—I know what’s at stake and it’s my life and my kid’s lives and my husband’s life, my family,” she said “I was going to have an abortion.”
Campbell chose a medical abortion utilizing the two abortion pills—mifepristone and misoprostol—and her husband took the day off while she had cramps and what felt like a heavy period.
“My medical abortion was done out of love for my family … because there were a lot of things that could have gone wrong for me,” she said.
Looking Ahead to November
Now, to ensure other women in Nevada—and future generations—have the same reproductive freedom and quality of healthcare that she received, Campbell is preparing to knock doors and educate voters about the abortion amendment on November’s ballot.
Enshrining the right to an abortion in the Constitution is something that will “be in the history books,” she said.
“[What if] 15 or 20 years from now, something happens to Lily, she’s not safe, she won’t be as protected as I was,” Campbell said. “I’m going to do whatever I can for that to not happen.”
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