A Eureka woman who nearly bled to death while miscarrying twins last year is suing the Catholic hospital chain that she claims refused her life-saving abortion care.

Anna Nusslock, a chiropractor who sued Providence St. Joseph Hospital Eureka and its parent companies in Humbolt Superior Court on Tuesday, said she hopes the action will force the company’s California hospitals to follow state law.

“The work that we’re doing is going to protect people today and it’s going to help people survive,” she said. “I’m hoping to hold the whole Providence healthcare system accountable.”

The hospital says it already complies with the law.

“The experience described in this lawsuit is deeply saddening and troubling,” a spokesperson for Providence South Division wrote in a statement. “We are fully committed to delivering care in accordance with federal and state law, as well as our mission as a faith-based organization. This includes providing emergency life-saving medical interventions that may result in indirect fetal death.”

The suit builds on a September action filed by California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta, accusing the hospital of violating the state’s emergency services law.

“There is an existing injunction in the attorney general’s case, but it’s only against the hospital and it is limited just to while the litigation is pending,” said K.M. Bell, senior litigation counsel for reproductive rights and health at the National Women’s Law Center, which brought the lawsuit with Nusslock.

Tuesday’s suit seeks to make the injunction permanent and binding for all St. Joseph hospitals in California.

“I’ve been really surprised at how healing the process has been,” Nusslock said. “We need to be putting pressure on these hospitals.”

Nusslock and her husband had been trying for years for a baby when she got pregnant with twins in late 2023. After her water broke late last February, just 15 weeks into her pregnancy, she rushed to the emergency room fearing the worst.

Yet, despite clear signs Nusslock’s life was in peril and her twins could not survive, the ER’s attending physician told her she was not “sufficiently close to death,” to receive emergency abortion care, according to court papers.

“I remember saying to somebody, ‘But this is California!’” Nusslock recalled. “But it’s a technicality when the only hospital you can have a baby at won’t help you.”

On the advice of the St. Joseph emergency room doctor, a hemorrhaging Nusslock drove herself 12 miles to Mad River Community Hospital where both twins were delivered dead, one spontaneously and the second via an abortion procedure.

“‘If you try to drive [to UCSF], you will hemorrhage and die before you get to a place that can help you,’” the St. Joseph doctor told her, according to the suit.

In December, after Mad River closed its labor and delivery department, another woman sued the Eureka hospital, alleging she was denied similar care during three separate miscarriages.

In the first incident described in her claim, she traveled five and a half hours to San Francisco “in active labor” for help. The second time, she required two units of blood to recover from a preventable hemorrhage. In the third, she alleges she was left to deliver her dead baby into a hospital toilet.

The woman now suffers from post-traumatic stress, anxiety and depression “from being denied care at the only major hospital—and now the only labor & delivery unit—in her county,” the suit said.

“Because Plaintiff desperately wants to have a baby, Providence St. Joseph is certainly the hospital where she will go for her next delivery,” the suit said.

The hospital has denied wrongdoing in court filings.

As American hospitals consolidate, an ever-growing number are now run by Catholic groups. According to the Catholic Hospital Association of the United States, one in seven patients in the U.S. receives care at one of their facilities. More than 15% of American babies are born in Catholic hospital delivery rooms.

After the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturned the right to abortion in the 2022, about two dozen states restricted or outlawed the procedure, about half of them with narrow exceptions for life or death cases.

But Catholic hospitals in many abortion-protective states such as California also deny terminations in cases such as Nusslock’s.

“These refusals of care unfortunately are not new,” Bell said. “But the situation is more dire now post-Dobbs.”

Although St. Joseph’s agreed last fall to provide emergency abortion care, the hospital has since reversed course, seeking to have the state DOJ suit dismissed on the grounds that compliance infringes on its 1st Amendment right to religious freedom.

“SJH could not comply with such an order without forsaking its Catholic identity—the ultimate burden in a religious freedom case,” the motion said.

Bonta said the hospital was flouting the law.

“The stakes of this could not be clearer: having acknowledged that they have, and will continue to, violate a law which requires them to adequately care for patients experiencing life threatening medical emergencies, SJH now asks this Court to condone their conduct by dismissing this action,” the state wrote in opposition to the motion.

The court is set to rule on the issue May 15.

In the meantime, Nusslock said the hospital’s actions have stiffened her resolve.

“It felt cruel and it continues to feel cruel,” Nusslock said. “You’re placing this religious policy over my actual life.”

NWS in Sacramento has issued a tornado warning Grass Valley, Nevada County, Yuba County, and Loma Rica amid severe weather across California.

The Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle environmental protections and roll back nationwide progress toward clean energy disproportionately target California and other blue states, internal documents show.

As early as this week, the Department of Energy may pull funding from hundreds of projects — many of which were bolstered by President Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure law and are geared toward climate-friendly initiatives such as solar power, heat pumps, battery storage and renewable fuels, according to a leaked list reviewed by The Times.

The cuts could include as many as 262 projects in the DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, of which roughly 80% are based in states that did not go for Trump in the 2024 presidential election.

Also on the chopping block are nearly two dozen projects in the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, including a major national effort known as the Regional Clean Hydrogen Hubs (H2Hubs) Program, which aims to accelerate the development of hydrogen projects that can replace planet-warming fossil fuels.

Those cuts, too, are not applied equally: Of the seven states and regions selected to participate in the $7-billion federal hydrogen project, the four set to be gutted are in primarily Democratic areas.

The hydrogen incubators on the cut list include a hub in California; a Mid-Atlantic hub in Pennsylvania, Delaware and New Jersey; a Pacific Northwest hub in Oregon, Washington and Montana; and a Midwest hub in Illinois, Indiana and Michigan.

Meanwhile, the hydrogen hubs in red states and regions are safe, the list shows, including a large hub in Texas; a “heartland” hub in Minnesota, North Dakota and South Dakota; and an Appalachia hub in Ohio, West Virginia and Pennsylvania.

Officials with the Department of Energy did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

California was among 33 applicants for the competitive initiative, which launched in 2021 and ultimately selected seven “hubs” to develop and test various sources of hydrogen.

The California hub — known as ARCHES, or the Alliance for Renewable Clean Hydrogen Energy Systems — was awarded $1.2 billion in federal funds, with plans to bring in an additional $11.2 billion from private investors.

But it now faces cuts from Trump’s DOE despite the fact that the hub was the highest-scoring applicant among those considered for the federal award, according to sources familiar with the matter.

Democratic staff members with the House Science Committee who agreed to speak on background said the findings indicate that the cuts are partisan and ideological in nature — a trend in keeping with other actions from the Trump administration, which has repeatedly targeted environmental programs in California and other Democratic areas in recent weeks.

Indeed, cost alone does not appear to be a factor, given that Texas’s hydrogen hub received the same amount of federal funding — $1.2 billion — as California’s, yet the former was not on the cut list. The two states’ projects were the costliest of the hubs, which range from roughly $750 million to $1.2 billion.

The total cuts from the DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy amount to more than $905 million, with about $735 million coming from blue states and $169 million from red states, according to a Times analysis.

Insiders said the proportions do not reflect overall clean energy investments by red and blue states, with Republican states such as Texas — a clean energy juggernaut — facing far fewer cuts from that office. According to documents reviewed by The Times, only eight Texas projects are on the chopping block compared with 53 in California.

House Science Committee staffers cautioned that the leaked lists represent a snapshot in time and that the administration could change its plans before making any official announcements.

Already, they said, some Republican representatives and private industry leaders have been successful in stopping certain projects from being canceled. So far, none of their Democratic counterparts have been able to do the same, they said.

The cuts could have considerable implications for the nation’s energy future.

The seven hydrogen hubs were collectively expected to produce 3 million metric tons of hydrogen each year — reducing 25 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions, or roughly the amount of 5.5 million gas-powered cars.

Each of the seven hubs was experimenting with different sources of hydrogen, with California focused on producing hydrogen exclusively from renewable energy and biomass while other hubs worked with natural gas, nuclear power and renewable sources such as wind and solar.

Officials with ARCHES said it could be weeks before they have more clarity on the situation.

“ARCHES remains committed to working with our partners to establish a secure, reliable and competitive hydrogen ecosystem, creating hundreds of thousands of good-paying jobs and delivering substantial health and economic benefits for Californians,” Chief Executive Angelina Galiteva said in a statement. “We have nothing more to share at this time.”

Hydrogen is also not without controversy. Critics have expressed concern that producing hydrogen is water- and energy-intensive, potentially dangerous to transport and expensive.

Supporters say it fills in a key gap that electrification alone cannot cover, particularly for heavy industries such as manufacturing and transportation.

ARCHES planned to fund at least 37 smaller projects in and around California, including efforts to decarbonize the Port of Los Angeles, as well as plans to install more than 60 hydrogen fueling stations around the state.

The status of those projects remains unclear.

The president — who received record donations from fossil fuel companies during his campaign — has taken aim at what he describes as “environmental extremists, lunatics, radicals and thugs” in recent weeks, vowing instead to ramp up the production of coal, increase oil drilling and block California’s efforts to transition to electric vehicles, among other actions.