Kylie Cooper has seen all the ways a pregnancy can go terrifyingly, perilously wrong. She is an obstetrician who manages high-risk patients, also known as a maternal-fetal-medicine specialist, or MFM. The awkward hyphenation highlights the duality of the role. Cooper must care for two patients at once: mother and fetus, mom and baby. On good days, she helps women with complicated pregnancies bring home healthy babies. On bad days, she has to tell families that this will not be possible. Sometimes, they ask her to end the pregnancy; prior to the summer of 2022, she was able to do so.
That summer, Cooper felt a growing sense of dread. Thirteen states—including Idaho, where she practiced—had passed “trigger laws” meant to ban abortion if Roe v. Wade were overturned. When this happened, in June 2022, some of the bans proved so draconian that doctors feared they could be prosecuted for providing medical care once considered standard.
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This past fall, she came up with a backup plan: If she had to, she could stop practicing in Idaho and become a traveling doctor, seeing patients in other states.
