Connect with us

Published

on

Warning: This story contains details of a miscarriage which some people may find distressing.

“We broke Roe vs Wade,” president-elect Donald Trump said earlier this year, referring to the Supreme Court ruling in 2022 which stripped millions of American women of the legal right to abortion.

Some 36 days later, Ryan Hamilton, a radio host from Texas, found his wife passed out “in a huge pool of blood” on their toilet floor, their dead baby still inside her after she was denied abortion care.

“What I want is for people to understand that this is really happening and that abortion bans affect incomplete miscarriages, women like my wife,” Mr Hamilton told Sky News.

“Women have literally died and the thing I want the most is to make sure that my daughter’s future doesn’t include her bleeding out on a bathroom floor like her mum almost did.”

Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player

Trump called out over ‘abortion lies’

‘She was tortured for four days by the state of Texas’

In 2021 Texas introduced stringent laws on abortion, banning it after five weeks of pregnancy.

But after Roe vs Wade was overturned the next year, it went a step further and banned abortion in any circumstance except to save a woman’s life or prevent “substantial impairment of a major bodily function”.

Although Texas allows this exception, doctors and women argued in court last year that the state’s law is so restrictive and vaguely worded that physicians are afraid of providing abortions for fear they could face potential criminal charges.

Mr Hamilton claims the law’s vagueness is what caused his wife to almost die from her miscarriage.

“There’s no clarification as to how close to dead a woman has to be for them to legally perform the abortion care that she needs,” he said.

With his first daughter, a one-year-old, cooing in the background, Mr Hamilton described how his wife, 37, was 13 weeks pregnant when she miscarried while carrying their second child.

When they first realised something was wrong, the couple went to a medical centre near their home in a rural area of Texas, where the baby was found to have no heartbeat.

Mr Hamilton’s wife, who has asked to remain anonymous, was prescribed the drug misoprostol, more commonly known as an abortion pill.

That was a Thursday, Mr Hamilton recalls, but as it was too late in the day to get hold of the pill, his wife had to spend a “torturous” night with their dead baby still in her womb.

When morning came, Mr Hamilton went to the pharmacy and got the pill. But after his wife took the first dose, the couple called the medical centre to report something was “really wrong” as she was bleeding a lot.

They asked for an alternative to the pill but the medic on the phone said they should try again with the second dose and monitor the colour of the blood.

Mr Hamilton said: “They asked me what colour the blood was, they said it needs to be brown blood… I said ‘it’s bright red’ and they said ‘that’s not right’.

“So in the middle of losing our baby… We are being instructed on focusing on the colour of the blood in the toilet.”

Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player

Why could abortion pill be pulled in US?

After a night when Mr Hamilton’s wife experienced something akin to early labour, the situation hadn’t changed, so the couple went back to the centre in the hope of getting more support.

The doctor on shift, however, told them that “considering the current stance” he wouldn’t prescribe any more misoprostol – and also had no alternative to offer.

“We stood in the parking lot with our then nine-month-old daughter in the truck, trying to figure out what we were going to do because the risk of sepsis could have killed my wife… if we left our dead baby in there,” Mr Hamilton said.

They then decided to go to another hospital about an hour away. His wife was subjected to “more probing and prodding only to discover what we already knew, that our baby didn’t have a heartbeat”.

He said she was “bleeding profusely at this point… bleeding non-stop, bleeding through post-birth pads”.

Mr Hamilton said the doctors “disappeared for hours” only to come back and refuse to carry out dilation and curettage (D&C), a surgical procedure to remove the baby. The couple were sent home with a third dose of misoprostol instead.

Mr Hamilton said they were essentially saying “she’s not close enough to dead to perform this procedure as she has to reach the life of the mother exception under Texas law”.

“It’s nightmare stuff and my poor wife was tortured for four days by the state of Texas,” he said.

Sky News has approached Texas state authorities for comment.

According to online abortion service Women on Web, medical abortion is “effective and safe” up to 12 weeks of pregnancy. After that, the medicine will still be effective but the risk of complications increases, as does the chance of having to see a medical professional afterwards.

‘I thought she was going to die’

Mr Hamilton described how after taking the third dose of the abortion pill, his wife woke up on Sunday to even more bleeding.

“I wrapped her in the heating blanket, and she was cold, clammy cold. I propped her head up on the pillow and it was the first time I thought she was going to die.”

While checking on their daughter, he got a missed call from his wife, so he ran over and found she had “fallen off the toilet” and was lying in a “huge pool of blood”.

He picked her up and “put her unconscious body in the truck”, strapped their daughter in and drove to a third hospital in the hope of getting help.

As “she was close enough to dead”, she got life-saving care, regained consciousness and her body gradually recovered.

According to analysis shared with NBC, the number of women who died while pregnant, during labour or soon after giving birth skyrocketed following Texas’s five-week ban in 2021.

From 2019 to 2022, the rate of maternal mortality cases in Texas rose by 56%, compared with just 11% nationwide during the same time period, according to an analysis of federal public health data by the Gender Equity Policy Institute.

“We will carry that torturous experience with us for the rest of our lives,” Mr Hamilton said.

What could happen to abortion rights under second Trump administration?

It is hard to say what Trump’s second administration, due to start once he is inaugurated on 20 January, could mean for the future of abortion rights in the US as the president-elect has flip-flopped on the issue.

As president, he backed a House bill which would’ve banned abortion in the whole country after 20 weeks.

In March, he suggested he would support a nationwide ban on abortions after 15 weeks’ gestation.

But in the final stages of his latest campaign, which saw his Republican Party take control of both Houses, the 78-year-old said he would not sign a federal ban on abortion and would leave it to the states to decide what policies to adopt.

At the end of August, Mr Trump, whose wife Melania recently published a memoir where she came out in support of abortion rights, told Sky News’ US partner network NBC he believed the six-week abortion ban adopted by his home state of Florida was “too short”.

But as he faced fierce backlash from anti-abortion advocates, Mr Trump came out a day later to say he would be voting “no” on an unsuccessful ballot measure which would have expanded abortion access until foetal viability, around the 24th week of pregnancy.

Read more:
‘My baby lived for just 93 minutes’
US Supreme Court preserves women’s access to abortion pill

Nancy Northup, CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights, said his re-election is a “deadly threat” to reproductive health.

She said that as a result of Roe vs Wade being overturned, abortion is nearly or completely banned in 17 of the 50 US states.

As the results of the presidential election became clear, there were reports of Americans stockpiling abortion pills, while Plan C, which promotes access to abortion medication online, said searches to its homepage following the landslide vote for Mr Trump surged from 500 to 80,000 in a day.

Follow Sky News on WhatsApp
Follow Sky News on WhatsApp

Keep up with all the latest news from the UK and around the world by following Sky News

Tap here

Ms Northup said: “The unnecessary and cruel harm caused by the first Trump administration includes a reproductive healthcare crisis in vast swathes of the United States that has led to the deaths of numerous women who are likely the tip of the iceberg.

“A second Trump administration will compound these harms with new, potentially far worse ones.

“It will seek to stop the availability of medication abortion by mail, which has been a lifeline in post-Roe America,” she said.

There are also fears it will try to gag organisations based both in and outside of the US from advocating for abortion rights and providing care abroad, even with their non-US funds.

“Without Trump overturning Roe vs Wade then none of this starts to happen,” Mr Hamilton said, referring to the women who died or, like his wife, narrowly escaped death as a result of complications from being denied the care they needed.

“The priority is not my wife’s health, the priority becomes the legality of the procedure.”

At the heart of anti-abortionists’ campaigning is the belief in the sanctity of human life.

“In opposing abortion, we acknowledge the humanity of the child in the womb which fuels our effort to protect the pre-born child’s life,” Americans United for Life says.

Mr Trump’s campaign team has been approached for comment.

Continue Reading

US

National Guard arrives on streets of Washington DC despite ‘historic’ lows in crime

Published

on

By

National Guard arrives on streets of Washington DC despite 'historic' lows in crime

National Guard troops have begun arriving on the streets of Washington DC in a controversial move by Donald Trump to “rescue our nation’s capital from crime”.

The deployment of some of the planned 800 troops comes despite the Washington mayor revealing crime in the capital was at its “lowest level in 30 years” – and with official data also showing a steep decline.

President Trump has promised to take over the district’s police department, something the law allows him to do temporarily.

The army has indicated there were no specific locations for the deployment, according to the Associated Press, citing a White House official who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player

Trump: National Guard deployment will ‘take capital back’

At the beginning of the week, Mr Trump said he was sending in 800 National Guard troops to “re-establish law, order, and public safety”.

He announced a “historic action to rescue our nation’s capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor and worse”.

But according to preliminary figures from Washington DC’s Metropolitan Police, violent crime is down 26% in 2025 – after dropping 35% in 2024 compared with 2023.

Pic: Reuters
Image:
Pic: Reuters

Washington mayor Muriel Bowser said crime was at historic lows in the capital and called the move “unsettling and unprecedented” – but would use the extra personnel to reduce crime further.

And in a post on social media, she wrote: “Violent crime in DC is at its lowest level in 30 years. We had an unacceptable spike in 2023, so we changed our laws and strategies.”

She said the National Guard would not have the power to arrest people.

Troops will carry no weapons but will have their standard issue firearms, usually rifles, close at hand, an official said.

Read more from Sky News:
West Bank: The city locked down by armed troops
Facial recognition vans to be used by some police forces

The Democrats and other critics have called Mr Trump’s deployment “political theatre” – but the president has threatened to repeat the move in other big cities.

Jeanine Pirro, the US attorney for the capital, dismissed a question from a reporter about how violence in Washington compared to other cities.

She said: “All I know is we rank in death. I don’t need any more statistics.”

In Washington, the DC National Guard reports directly to the president.

In the states, the troops answer to the governor except when called into federal service.

Continue Reading

US

Europe’s concerns may be getting through as White House reframes Trump-Putin summit

Published

on

By

Trump-Putin summit starting to feel quite 'Midnight Sun' - as White House confirms location

It’s beginning to feel like “Midnight Sun” diplomacy.

In parts of Alaska, the sun doesn’t set in summer, casting light through the night but leaving you disorientated.

Ukraine latest: Zelenskyy reject’s Putin’s proposal

The Trump-Putin summit is pitched as “transparent” but it’s difficult to find any path to peace right now.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt has reduced it to a “listening exercise” where Donald Trump will seek a “better understanding” of the situation.

There isn’t much to understand – Russia wants territory, Ukraine isn’t ceding it – but Ms Levitt rejects talk of them “tempering expectations”.

It’s possible to be both hopeful and measured, she says, because Mr Trump wants peace but is only meeting one side on Friday.

It’s the fact that he’s only meeting Vladimir Putin that concerns European leaders, who fear Ukraine could be side-lined by any Trump-Putin pact.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy claims Mr Putin wants the rest of Donetsk and, in effect, the entire Donbas region in eastern Ukraine.

He’s ruled out surrendering that because it would rob him of key defence lines and leave Kyiv vulnerable to future offensives.

Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player

‘Steps have been taken to remedy the situation’ in Pokrovsk

European leaders – including Sir Keir Starmer – will hold online talks with Mr Zelenskyy twice on Wednesday, on either side of a virtual call with Mr Trump and US Vice President JD Vance.

Their concerns may be getting through, hence the White House now framing the summit as a cautious fact-finding exercise and nothing more.

The only thing we really learned from the latest news conference is that the first Trump-Putin meeting in six years will be in Anchorage.

Alaska itself, with its history and geography, is a layered metaphor: a place the Russians sold to the US in the 1800s.

Read more:
The land Ukraine could be forced to give up
Trump gaffe reveals how central Putin is to his narrative

Russian traditional nesting dolls with images of Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump at a gift shop in Moscow. Pic: Reuters
Image:
Russian traditional nesting dolls with images of Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump at a gift shop in Moscow. Pic: Reuters

A remote but strategic frontier where the lines of ownership and the rules of negotiation are once again being sketched out.

On a clear day, you can see Russia from Alaska, but without Mr Zelenskyy in the room, it’s difficult to see them conquering any summit.

In the place where the sun never sets, the deal might never start.

Continue Reading

US

Trump says he hopes to get ‘prime territory’ back for Ukraine as he prepares for Putin summit

Published

on

By

Trump says he hopes to get 'prime territory' back for Ukraine as he prepares for Putin summit

Donald Trump has said he would try to return territory to Ukraine as he prepares to meet Vladimir Putin and lay the groundwork for a deal to bring an end to the war.

“Russia has occupied a big portion of Ukraine. They’ve occupied some very prime territory. We’re going to try and get some of that territory back for Ukraine,” the US president said at a White House news conference ahead of Friday’s summit in Alaska.

Mr Trump also said: “There’ll be some land swapping going on. I know that through Russia and through conversations with everybody, to the good of Ukraine.”

He said he’s going to see what Mr Putin “has in mind” to end the three-and-a-half-year full-scale invasion.

Donald Trump speaks to reporters at the White House. Pic: Reuters
Image:
Donald Trump speaks to reporters at the White House. Pic: Reuters

And he said if it’s a “fair deal,” he will share it with European and NATO leaders, as well as Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who have been liaising closely with Washington ahead of the meeting.

Asked if Mr Zelenskyy was invited to the summit with Mr Putin in Alaska, Mr Trump said the Ukrainian leader “wasn’t a part of it”.

“I would say he could go, but he’s gone to a lot of meetings. You know, he’s been there for three and a half years – nothing happened,” Mr Trump added.

More on Donald Trump

The US president said Mr Putin wants to get the war “over with” and “get involved” in possible talks but acknowledged Moscow’s attacks haven’t stopped.

“I’ve said that a few times and I’ve been disappointed because I’d have a great call with him and then missiles would be lobbed into Kyiv or some other place,” he said.

Mr Trump said he will tell Mr Putin “you’ve got to end this war, you’ve got to end it,” but that “it’s not up to me” to make a deal between Russia and Ukraine.

Vladimir Putin is set to meet Donald Trump in Alaska. Pic: Reuters
Image:
Vladimir Putin is set to meet Donald Trump in Alaska. Pic: Reuters

Zelenskyy says Russia ‘wants to buy time’

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said Russia “wants to buy time, not end the war”.

“It is obvious that the Russians simply want to buy time, not end the war,” he wrote in a post on X, after a phone call with Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Pic: Reuters
Image:
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Pic: Reuters

“The situation on the battlefield and Russia’s wicked strikes on civilian infrastructure and ordinary people prove this clearly.”

Mr Zelenskyy said the two “agreed that no decisions concerning Ukraine’s future and the security of our people can be made without Ukraine’s participation”, just as “there can be no decisions without clear security guarantees”.

Sanctions against Russia must remain in force and be “constantly strengthened,” he added.

European leaders meet ahead of call with Trump

Meanwhile, European officials have been holding meetings ahead of a phone call with Mr Trump on Wednesday.

The European Union’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, has been speaking to foreign ministers virtually, saying on X that work “on more sanctions against Russia, more military support for Ukraine and more support for Ukraine’s budgetary needs and accession process to join the EU” is under way.

Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player

‘Russians want to carry on fighting’

Over the weekend, European leaders released a joint statement, welcoming Mr Trump’s “work to stop the killing in Ukraine”.

“We are convinced that only an approach that combines active diplomacy, support to Ukraine and pressure on the Russian Federation to end their illegal war can succeed,” read the statement.

It was signed by UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, French President Emmanuel Macron, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, Finland’s President Alexander Stubb, and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.

“We underline our unwavering commitment to Ukraine’s sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity,” they said.

Read more from Sky News:
Trump will deploy National Guard to Washington
CCTV shows hospital volunteer being shot dead at point-blank range

Follow the World
Follow the World

Listen to The World with Richard Engel and Yalda Hakim every Wednesday

Tap to follow

Attacks continue

Despite Donald Trump’s efforts to convince Vladimir Putin to commit to a ceasefire and negotiations, Russian attacks on Ukraine have only intensified in the past few months.

Ukraine’s president has said that, in the past week, Russia launched more than 1,000 air bombs, nearly 1,400 drones and multiple missile strikes on Ukraine.

On 9 July, Russia carried out its largest aerial attack on Ukraine since the start of the war, launching more than 740 drones and missiles, breaking its records from previous weeks.

Furthermore, Mr Zelenskyy has said Russia is preparing for new offensives.

Continue Reading

Trending