Her doctors knew how to save her life. Georgia made them wait.
Synopsis
Avery Davis Bell, a research geneticist and mom, was preparing to welcome her second child when a pregnancy complication put her life at risk. She nearly died after Georgia’s abortion ban delayed the emergency abortion her doctors said she needed.
Her story is now part of an amicus brief alongside other families living under Georgia’s six-week abortion ban in SisterSong v. State of Georgia, a lawsuit filed in 2022 asserting that the ban violates the Georgia Constitution’s protection for the fundamental right to privacy. Read an excerpt of her brief below.
Avery Davis Bell and her husband, Julian, met as undergraduates at Swarthmore College. After earning a doctorate from Harvard Medical School, Avery became a research geneticist. Julian is an MIT-trained mechanical engineer. Knowing that one day they wanted to have children and raise them near their extended family, they decided to return to Avery’s hometown of Atlanta in 2020.
The couple welcomed their first child, a son, in the summer of 2021. Avery says that parenting is one of the hardest things that she and Julian have done together, but also the “best, most meaningful and joyful thing.” Just before their son turned three, they decided to try for another child. Soon enough, after tracking Avery’s fertility cycle, a pregnancy test showed they had been successful, with a due date of late March 2025.
Avery and Julian quickly realized that this pregnancy would not be like their first. Around seven weeks gestation, ultrasounds showed a pooling of blood between the uterine wall and the sac that surrounds the fetus—a condition known as a subchorionic hemorrhage. But as Avery’s pregnancy reached its second trimester and genetic screening results were normal, Avery and Julian felt comfortable sharing news of the pregnancy with their family and friends, and—most importantly—their son, who delighted in the idea of being a big brother. Every time he saw Avery, the three-year-old would say: “Hi mama! Hi baby!”
Every time he saw Avery, the three-year-old would say: ‘Hi mama! Hi baby!’
Around sixteen weeks gestation, Avery was bleeding so often and heavily that her [condition was] endangering her own health and pregnancy. She was hospitalized several times. During her second admission, Avery’s doctors explained their growing concern that if Avery’s anemia progressed, or if the fetus stopped developing, her pregnancy would need to be terminated to save her own life. Worse, her fetus would still be too underdeveloped to survive outside of the womb. Her doctors explained that the safest option—if a termination would be needed to preserve her own health—was to undergo a dilation and evacuation (“D&E”) abortion, a procedure that would not worsen her already weakened condition.
But the doctors made clear they could not yet act to save Avery’s life because she was not yet “sick enough” to qualify for an exception to Georgia’s abortion ban. So, even as she got sicker, Avery and her doctors could only hope for the best while closely monitoring her health.
Avery was sent home and confined to bedrest. Still, she clung to the hope that her condition would stabilize and her pregnancy could be saved.
Then, a week later, still home, Avery passed a blood clot the size of a dinner plate, which was “terrifying and different from the earlier bleeding.” She went to the hospital, where she learned she had become severely anemic and that her water had broken, a development that foreclosed any chance her fetus could survive and put Avery at immediate and significant risk of infection. Her doctors explained the consequences with certainty—her pregnancy needed to be terminated or else Avery could die. That’s when “Julian just broke down, and I wanted to, too,” she said, “but instead I had to go into crisis management mode.”
Even though the pregnancy was no longer viable, Georgia’s abortion laws prevented her doctors from moving immediately to provide Avery with the life-preserving care she needed.
Because Avery’s fetus still showed signs of cardiac activity, fear of liability under Georgia’s abortion ban tied Avery’s doctors’ hands. Before taking any steps to prepare Avery for the procedure she needed, Avery’s doctors concluded that they were required to first give her the state-scripted disclosures mandated by Georgia law and obtain her written certification that she had received such disclosures at least 24 hours prior to her abortion.
So, Avery and Julian waited. They put grief for the loss of their expected baby on hold and tried to focus on when Avery would be able to receive life-saving abortion care.
Avery signed the consent forms saying she reviewed the state-mandated disclosures, which she already knew were rife with scientific inaccuracies, including about fetal pain. She recalls this requirement as “cruel” and “emotional torture” that “added insult to injury.”
Avery’s doctors kept asking, “Do you feel worse?” She understood this query as a substitute for their actual but unasked questions: “Are you dying faster? Can you help us prove you’re dying fast enough to require emergency care?” Finally, her hemoglobin fell so low that she was on the verge of requiring a blood transfusion, an indisputable life-or-death emergency.
This having to wait while my expected baby was dying inside me and I was at extreme risk and my whole community was on tenterhooks to see if I would be OK was the most traumatic experience of my life.
This terrible news—and its unequivocal nature—may have saved Avery’s life. About 20 hours after her water broke, doctors were finally able to prepare Avery for an abortion by administering the medication misoprostol to dilate her cervix. “This having to wait while my expected baby was dying inside me and I was at extreme risk and my whole community was on tenterhooks to see if I would be OK was the most traumatic experience of my life.” When Avery’s doctors finally performed the abortion, the risk of hemolytic crisis was so significant that they had to administer a blood transfusion to ensure she had sufficient blood supply to combat the anemia and safely undergo the procedure.
Avery knows how very precarious her situation was. “No human person in the world should have to go through that,” she says. “It’s unconscionable on the part of the State.” She realizes that her life could easily have ended while her doctors’ hands were tied by Georgia’s abortion ban. Avery believes that requiring doctors to “decide how far down the path you have to go towards life-threatening” and “jump through hoops based on where you are in the pregnancy,” creates “huge consequences, even for people like me, who have fantastic doctors that I screened, and even though I understood everything that was going on with me. We [had] made a plan for if I needed a[n abortion] … and it was still completely awful and very scary.”
As Avery heals from the emotional and physical trauma of her experience, she knows that her doctors did everything they could. But Georgia’s abortion ban undermined her healthcare choices and her doctors’ ability to exercise their medical expertise in managing her care and injected significant uncertainty—not to mention life-threatening risks—“every step of the way.”
No human person in the world should have to go through that. It’s unconscionable on the part of the State.
Avery and Julian have sought to commemorate their expected baby in various ways: Avery got a tattoo of the moon that they saw the night they went to the hospital and of the owl that visited them after. They have compiled a scrapbook with their baby’s footprints and planted a maple tree, a gift from colleagues. They have talked about the loss with their three-year- old son in the “language and emotions” that he can understand. Avery also decided to honor her loss by speaking out publicly about what she went through. “This was my baby in my heart, my expected baby, and all our hopes and dreams,” but “[t]here was nothing anyone could do to make that baby live.” She says how “disrespectful and demeaning” it was for Georgia to put her through the indignity that she faced and the fear that she would not return home to mother her son. She knows that, if Georgia’s abortion ban stands, what she went through “can happen to anyone in any circumstance.”
It is not lost upon Avery and Julian that March 2025, when this case [was intended] to be heard, was also when their expected baby should have been due. She hopes the Court will deliver a decision that ensures no other Georgian has to suffer unnecessarily, the way she and her family did. “Trying to categorize when the life of the mother is enough ‘at risk’ ignores that everyone’s situation is unique and only puts everyone in danger.” To Avery, “it needs to be safe for everyone in Georgia to have children. It isn’t now.” She is resolute that Georgia’s abortion ban “will not take her family planning from” her and hopes to have another child.
Reflecting on Georgia’s abortion ban, Avery says, “you’re risking killing children’s moms… I don’t understand it, but let’s say that it’s coming from a good place of wanting to protect life. It’s doing the opposite. My baby was never going to survive. That’s devastating to me. It’s also just the truth… There’s no reason for me not to survive too.”
If this happened to you or someone you love, contact Abortion in America or reach out to our team directly at Amplify Legal.
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