The VA Just Abandoned Women Who Serve
A firsthand account of military medical violence and the deadly cost of denying abortion care
by Melissa Corrigan, Director of Social Strategy and Engagement & Contributor, Blue Amp Media
The year was 2004.
Early November, but the unusually warm days made it feel like our nation was reaching a literal boiling point; externally, engaged in a war-that-was-not-a-war in the foreign realm of Iraq, and internally, still reeling from 9/11. President George W. Bush had just been reelected by a good margin, nailing down my immediate future as an active-duty sailor on board a forward-deployed aircraft carrier.
None of that was on my mind that day. My body was being stretched and torn asunder as active labor bore down on me and I prepared for the birth of my first child. A Sunday that had begun innocently enough: sleeping in, waking to the smell of chili cooking downstairs, and the sound of football on the TV as my in-laws watched their team. Going to the bathroom and going and going and realizing this wasn’t just pee, it was something more.
The scramble to get the pre-packed bags together, make arrangements for the dog, bundle into the SUV, and set off on the 45-minute journey to the hospital.
But pulling through the gates of the Air Force base, seeing the low rectangle of brick where my child would be born, I breathed a sigh of relief to be in the hands of medical professionals. I rolled out of the car, not knowing I was walking into one of the most hellacious experiences of my life.
“At least half an inch of blood across the floor… my shoes slipped in it,” my then-husband would tell me later.
Medical malpractice isn’t a recognized “thing” for active duty servicemembers in the military.
The Day I Didn’t Die (but almost…)
There are few days in my memory that I can say were ones that I really, truly thought would be my last. Exhausted after hours of active labor, after arguing with nurses to even admit me, although I was technically a week overdue, after seeing the visible annoyance on my doctor’s face when he finally arrived (if I recall correctly, he’d literally been called off the golf course), all I wanted was this baby out of me.
I could no longer bear the pain and had instructed my husband to tear up the carefully prepared birth plan and throw it away. I wanted drugs. I wanted whatever would make the pain stop. The epidural dulled the pain, but the pressure remained. I felt that intense pressure to push, but the growing swarm of masked nurses who exchanged looks at one another over my belly instructed me to hold off. They seemed to be growing especially frenetic in their energy. I was attached to tubes and wires, and a wire was inside me, attached to my son’s head.
We all watched as his heartbeat flickered. Fluttered. The glances between nurses grew more urgent and they all retreated, a vacuum of noise and energy from the room. I breathed in between contractions in the sudden expanse of silence. Breathed out.
Breathed in deeply, feeling the pain and intense pressure coming back. As it bore down on me, the door flew open.
The doctor burst in, ordering the swarm of nurses with the bearing of a commander in a combat zone- urgent and sharp. Some descended upon me, the rest scattering to surround my extended family and gently but firmly escort them from the room.
One older nurse pulled down her mask and got right down to my face. As I was cramped in half in the middle of a powerful contraction, she was practically yelling at me the current condition of my child. And me.
“…. we have to get you in surgery right now…. losing baby…. you have to sign this right now.” A paper with a line, I grabbed the pen and scribbled something, and before the pen left my hand, I was being bodily lifted by the sheet underneath me onto the awaiting gurney and we rushed out of the room, down the hall, and banged through the swinging doors of the operating suite.
Bright, bright lights in my eyes. I felt my husband’s hand holding mine, and I looked up into his warm blue eyes. He raised his head and his eyes widened. I slipped away, warm darkness enveloping me.
My last thought was hoping my son survived.
All went dark.
Fire and Blood
I felt very, very heavy as I came to. My eyes were foggy as they opened and I struggled to focus on the two people at the foot of my bed. They were doing that whisper-yell thing, well, one of them was. A pretty, dark-haired woman with a strong jaw and a stethoscope around her neck was hissing at my doctor, her finger jabbing at him.
I shifted, ever so slightly, and both of their heads snapped towards me. Only one of them moved to care for me.
As my doctor slipped out of the room, the woman lifted my wrist and took my pulse as she smiled warmly, peering at my face and asking how I felt. If I hurt. If anything felt strange.
I interrupted her to ask if my son was okay.
She stopped talking and smiled broadly.
“Oh, yes, he’s wonderful. Very healthy. Let me check you out and you can meet him.” She kept talking about how long his eyelashes were and how beautiful he was as she beckoned through the door and nurses began filing in, each of them taking some measurement of my health: temperature, blood pressure, cold fingers poking into my sore, now-squishy and empty belly.
And finally, three days after my son was born, he was laid in my arms. I looked into his milk chocolate eyes and thus began the most powerful love adventure of my life.
Through the fire and the blood, we emerged. Together.
But fire and blood was not supposed to be his birth experience, the story of how he came into this world. The story of pain had been written by an Air Force doctor with a huge ego, a deep, obvious dislike of women, and an inordinate amount of power in his hands.
Some of the other women in his care hadn’t been so lucky.*
This doctor had been insulting and ignoring me for my entire pregnancy.
I began experiencing symptoms of preeclampsia in my eighth month, and since I had read several books on pregnancy, I mentioned this to him. My regular resting blood pressure is very low, always has been. So much so that when my blood pressure is elevated, it barely registers on the bottom of the “high blood pressure” scale.
I’ve had multiple appointments throughout my life where my blood pressure is taken and the nurse remarks, “How are you even standing up?” or something similar.
So when I was being checked in for that appointment in September, I clocked my high blood pressure immediately. Coupled with my swollen ankles and dizziness, I knew that I was checking all the boxes for preeclampsia. I spoke up. The nurse glanced at the BP reading and shrugged.
“You’re fine, little mama. That’s not too bad.”
When the doctor came into the room, he barely glanced at me as he rattled off what week I currently was and joking about the Halloween due date. As he began his cursory physical exam, I drew his attention to my ankles. I pushed my fingers into them and showed him how the indentations stayed, like memory foam. He sighed deeply as he pushed back from the exam table on his rolling chair.
“Listen, I see this all the time. The truth is, being pregnant is not a free-for-all with the ice cream and junk food like it looks on TV. You have to watch your caloric intake.”
I felt anger growing as I protested. I could barely keep food down, much less eat too much, and fat doesn’t hold indentation like edema does. Swelling, fluid retention. I knew I wasn’t well.
He sharply rebuked me, reminded me that he was not only my doctor but a superior officer, and left the room, an abrupt end to the appointment.
Six weeks later, he would have me die.
On the day of the emergency C-section, several protocols were not followed or observed. I was not given blood thickeners despite the notation of persistent anemia in my chart. My son was not given the appropriate medication on birth, delaying his release from the hospital as he had to receive it later.
Preeclampsia was not notated at all until the moment of the decision to conduct an emergency C-section… because of complications of preeclampsia.
I seized on that operating table.
Nerves were cut in my abdomen that have never come back.
And finally, he cut an artery and as the blood gushed from my body, he walked away, stripped his gloves, and asked my family, “Who is the dependent on her life insurance?”
Air Force OBGYN Major Case, the female doctor, was arriving for her shift and ran into the OR in her civilian street clothes, yanking on a glove and pinching that artery shut before cauterizing it, saving my life with a brief sear of fire.
Fire and blood.
A man who would have let me die, a woman who saved my life.
There Are More Of Us…
If my story does not chill you enough, I want to tell you the story of Cindy Wilson, a woman who experienced nearly the identical birth experience I did, in the exact same operating room at the exact same hospital.
Except… Cindy died.1
And Navy Lt. Rebekah Daniel, who bled to death four hours after childbirth at Naval Hospital Bremerton (the Supreme Court denied hearing her widower’s case).2
I could go on and on, unfortunately, but here’s the common theme: women are not listened to, heard, or respected as patients in our military healthcare system.
So when a young woman, one of our nation’s finest who stepped up and swore an oath to protect her nation, is raped, by a stranger or by one of her peers, when she walks into a military hospital in tears, seeking healing and justice, she may just be walking into one of the most hellacious experiences of her life.
If her rapist has impregnated her, the military to which she swore her life will not give her a full panel of healthcare options.
They will tell her to pick up her maternity uniforms from the Supply Department and reach out to her detailer to find appropriate assignment for maternal duty.
They will tell her that because her womb is the property of the United States military, she does not have the privilege of accessing medical abortion care through their system, or, in states with bans, even out in her community.
She is now a permanent prisoner of her rapist, duty bound to either raise a child she did not want, essentially ending her career, or to place that child in a foster or adoption system that is absolutely rife with abuse.
An unwanted child, borne into chaos and trauma. A woman, basically used as a brood mare and who risks her very life by giving birth in a military medical facility but not given any option out of the situation.
And if she dies, a final indignity: her family cannot even sue for medical malpractice.
Could our Secretary of Defense be any more obvious with his clear and sinister hatred for women?
Not Even Our Fault
The real kicker, the icing on the whole entire cake— and I want to be especially careful when I talk about this because I know my son, whom I adore, will read this— is this: five women on my ship found ourselves pregnant in one month. When we congregated in Medical, we were all confused and furious because we were dutifully taking our birth control, hormonal birth control pills, distributed right there by ship’s Medical. When we were asked to bring the packages in, three of us still had them.
All were five years’ expired.
We found ourselves cornered into motherhood well ahead of our personal schedules, in a medical system designed to stitch close bullet holes and amputate mangled limbs with extraordinarily little regard for female lives, and as a direct result of the medical incompetence of the system itself.
It’s a wonder we survived it at all.
VA Ends Access to Abortion Care in All Its Facilities
On December 18th, 2025, a quiet announcement3 rippled out through low levels of independent media: the VA is no longer providing abortion care to military veterans or dependents, even in cases of rape or incest.
On January 29, 2025, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth already rescinded4 key components of abortion care for active duty military women, begrudgingly “allowing” abortion care in cases of rape and incest in certain Military Treatment Facilities (MTF) but yanking back the tactical components of that care: travel allowances, administrative leave policies, and- most critical- requirements for commanders’ professional obligations to supersede their personal beliefs on the matter.
Meaning, an active duty military woman stationed in a state with abortion bans who has been raped and whose closest MTF does not have an OBGYN facility no longer has any of the protections and allowances previously afforded her to be able to procure the abortion care she needs to continue her career as planned.
All of this is aside from the many, many military spouses who are forced to give birth in MTFs if a TRICARE-approved hospital is not nearby or if a MTF is simply closer.
And in those facilities, they— active duty, veteran, and dependent alike— are statistically more likely to die at the hands of underqualified, rushed, or just annoyed medical personnel who are also now empowered to hide their utter contempt for women behind the guise of religious conviction to deny or obfuscate legitimate medical care.
All roads lead to women dying.
//
Melissa Corrigan was an active-duty Navy sailor when she went into labor on a Sunday morning and walked into Langley Air Force Base for the birth of her child. On that Wednesday afternoon, after being semi-comatose for three days, she awoke and finally met her child. Three months and three weeks later, her presence was expected back on board the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower and she sailed out of Naval Station Norfolk, leaving her child behind as she honored her obligation to the military that was so ready to abandon her to death itself. And this is the story of being a woman rising to the call of service to our nation. We don’t “owe” these women abortions; we owe these women the respect and dignity of choice, of empowerment and support through critical medical decisions with all the honor they are due.
*Many years have passed since the author held the proof (a laptop long since dead), but other women died under the care of this doctor. Without the appropriate references, those claims can only be appropriately and legally categorized as hearsay at this time. The doctor was removed from his position at Langley Air Force Base and reassigned, but for all we know he continued to treat pregnant women at his next duty station. We may never know how many women’s lives he took.
Jesus Christ! WTAF!
Why is this situation being permitted to continue in our modern voluntary military? There is no excuse for the mental and physical deaths that could have been prevented. Shame on the people who permit this violation of women's rights to continue.