
She needed an abortion but KY’s ban prevented it. ‘Somebody is going to die,’ doctors warn.
When Genevieve Postlethwait’s water broke in her sleep one July morning, she knew something was wrong. At 17 weeks pregnant, it was too soon for this to be normal. That afternoon at her OB-GYN’s office, Genevieve and her husband saw their daughter’s moving shape on an ultrasound screen. But she looked different — opaque, hard to see, almost “squished,” the 35-year-old recalled. The ultrasound tech was “clearly rattled and didn’t know what to say.” Over the next several hours, Genevieve learned her daughter would not continue developing without that fluid, and now she was at serious risk of severe infection, too. Even though there was still a fetal heartbeat, her pregnancy was no longer viable. But because of the OB-GYN’s own religious beliefs — and because of Kentucky’s restrictive abortion bans, the expectant couple later came to understand — their doctor would not surgically remove the fetus, and she could not recommend where Genevieve could go to get an abortion, even though it is widely considered the standard of care in this scenario. “Her plan of action was to send us home and drink lots of water,” Genevieve said. Less than a week later, at a loss for options that felt safe from the Paducah hospital where Genevieve had hoped to give birth to a healthy baby for the first time, the couple instead drove roughly 70 miles to an Illinois clinic and charged $1,100 to a credit card to end her pregnancy. Genevieve’s situation is not unusual in Kentucky. Five OB-GYNs and high-risk maternal fetal medicine doctors across central and southern Kentucky told the Herald-Leader that the commonwealth’s near-total abortion bans and their vaguely defined exceptions do not permit doctors to legally provide the standard of care to patients like Genevieve. All said their ability to safely treat pregnant patients who require a medically indicated abortion has been compromised by state statute. Nearly all have referred patients out of state for these procedures, fearful of performing them in violation of the law and being charged with a felony. Kentucky’s abortion bans have routinely prevented doctors from providing the standard of care since they were enacted in 2022, according to interviews for this story and previous Herald-Leader stories. But lawmakers still haven’t taken steps to remediate the law’s impact in this way, either by considerably rolling back the ban, removing or lessening its criminal penalty or by adding more exceptions.