1
I HAD A NIGHTMARE again about the trial, and woke up sweaty and angry, although the “sweaty” part might have been a hot flash. I lay awake in the dark, thinking about menopause instead of the trial. Were my symptoms bad enough to merit a prescription for estrogen? I thought about the speech I gave my own patients: every treatment comes with trade-offs. Side effects or long-term risks. You’re the expert on you. What does your intuition tell you?
I finally gave up on sleeping again right away and reached for my e-reader. I liked to settle my mind at bedtime by rereading an old favorite, and I had been rereading a particular favorite over and over since I got arrested. A few pages in, my eyes grew heavy again, and I set it aside and dozed.
I had to drag myself up when the alarm went off. It was a bright, cold winter day, the kind where even if there’s nowhere for a draft to get in, the cold seeps through the windows and walls. Since I had a job interview, I put on makeup and did my hair. The scent of the foundation reminded me of the trial, too—my attorney had insisted I wear makeup every day, and also a dress, the more femme the better. Even though there, my intuition said I should wear a suit—something that said “doctor,” that said “authority.” I had deferred to her instructions. And, well. I’d gotten off, after all.
I had some coffee, checked my appearance one more time, did my best to shake off the lingering anxiety from the dream or the interview or both, and headed out.
* * *
THE INTERVIEW WAS AT a new maternity practice, associated with an even newer maternity hospital, built to solve the problem of obstetricians leaving the Dakotas. If you had the money, and especially if you had any sort of high-risk pregnancy, you could temporarily move to Minnesota and give birth here. Three big, ugly apartment buildings just north of I-94 offered spare furnished apartments; the clinic and maternity hospital (“All we do is babies, and we do it well!” announced highway billboards) were just down the road, with the top-notch NICU facilities of St. Paul Children’s nearby, should anyone need them. The clinic was called MinneBaby, and to be honest, I hated this name, but fortunately I knew through the grapevine that everyone who actually worked there called it MB.
The MB clinic was in an office park, and I walked in through the main entrance, through a lobby full of heavily pregnant women, a few with toddlers in tow. A gray-haired woman in a white coat came out and waved when she spotted me. “Are you Dr. Elizabeth Gwinn?”
“Liz, please, but yes, that’s me.” I followed her back to a meeting room, where a circle of doctors waited for me.
The interview went fine, right up until someone asked why I left my last job. The first time this happened in a job interview I actually blurted out, “Didn’t you follow the news coverage?” and it still threw me every time—how are you an obstetrician who doesn’t know about this? One state over? But sometimes they knew and just wanted to hear how I framed the story, so I took a deep breath and summoned up my well-rehearsed answer.
“I spent most of my career in Minot, North Dakota. Last year I had a patient with severe treatment-resistant hyperemesis gravidarum. Her kidneys were failing, and I performed a termination, at her request. The prosecutor decided to make an example out of me and filed charges. I was acquitted after a trial, but I decided I didn’t feel comfortable working in North Dakota anymore, so I moved here.”
Light dawned. She had heard the story, but she hadn’t connected it to me. “I thought that doctor—er, I thought I heard you went to work at the big abortion clinic in Illinois.”
“They offered me a job, but I actually prefer maternity care. I just need to be able to take care of my patients to the best of my ability.” Going on trial had been terrifying. Aside from my bitterness toward my home state, I knew myself well enough to be pretty sure that my clinical judgment would be impaired by my own desperate desire not to wind up in that position again.
“Doesn’t the law provide some sort of exception for the life of the mother?”
“Well, that was kind of what the trial came down to. Whether my patient was sick enough for that to count. The prosecutor said that she had ‘morning sickness,’ like any woman with a wanted pregnancy would terminate for something they could have managed with saltine crackers or even Diclectin or ondansetron. My patient was in recovery from an eating disorder when she got pregnant, and she’d started out seriously underweight. She lost thirty-six pounds from the hyperemesis, and her labs showed her kidneys were failing. The prosecutor said the kidney damage I was seeing was from the anorexia rather than from the hyperemesis.” It was quite possible that she’d started the pregnancy with compromised kidneys and not realized it. “The course of HG can be unpredictable, and the prosecutor pointed out she might have spontaneously recovered from it the day after I performed the abortion.”
There were other reasons Maddy had wanted to end the pregnancy. This hadn’t been planned. She’d wanted to leave her husband, not have a child together. She’d clawed her way back from full-blown anorexia to a fragile recovery, and she’d immediately feared that this pregnancy was going to cause her to relapse.
She’d begged me to terminate the pregnancy.
And then she’d testified against me. I don’t know exactly what happened between the day I performed the abortion for her and the day of the trial, but I’d heard she’d reconciled with her husband, and it seemed to have something to do with pressure from her parents. My lawyer thought the prosecutor had leaned on her, threatened to charge her criminally for the abortion as well, because on the stand she blamed me for not doing something else. Anything else. What else? How would she know, she wasn’t a doctor, just a mother who would never hold her baby because I had taken it from her.
During the expert testimony on HG, I’d looked at the jurors. During voir dire, all the women had been asked if they had children, if they’d been pregnant, if they’d experienced morning sickness themselves. There was an older woman who had four children and two grandchildren who kept looking at me, her face set, and I felt a lurch every time she did, convinced that she was already planning to find me guilty. It wasn’t like what I did was in any sort of doubt.
I was wrong about her. I found this out later, long after the words not guilty had sent shock waves down through my feet. She’d been the one who’d refused to convict me. Who’d held firm until everyone else had come around.
Another interviewer asked about my bedside manner and charting practices, and I was relieved at the change in subject. Then someone else went back to the trial. “You know a lot of the women we care for are from North Dakota…”
“I would be delighted to continue to care for women from North Dakota,” I said. “My quarrel was never with the women of North Dakota.”
“We’ll be in touch,” they finally said, and the woman who’d met me in the lobby walked me out.
Back in my car, I saw I had a text from my father. He still lived in Minot. When I moved to Minnesota, he’d come out to look over some senior housing options close to me, only to suffer a case of extreme sticker shock and go back to Minot and the little postwar bungalow where I’d grown up. And to be fair, his friends were all in Minot—mostly at the VFW post where he hung out almost every afternoon. How’d it go??? his text said. I’d told him about the interview during our weekly chat.
I decided this was too complicated to try to explain by text and called him back. “They’re not going to hire me,” I said.
“Oh, Lizzie,” he said. (Only people who changed my diapers are allowed to call me Lizzie. Mom died in 2012, so at this point that means one person.) “You sound so sure, but you never think people like you.”
“No, it wasn’t that. It was the way they looked at me when we talked about the trial.”
“That came up?”
“Dad. Of course it came up.” I took a long breath and tried to sort out my perennial impostor’s syndrome from my actual impressions of the interview. “They’re going to come up with some reasonable excuse, like that my vibes were off, or I seemed a little cold, but the sad truth is, it’s hard for doctors to admit that I didn’t do anything wrong, and still wound up on trial for something I very definitely did.”
“Doesn’t Minnesota—”
“Abortion is totally legal here! But even here, other doctors want to convince themselves that it wouldn’t have happened to them because they’d have documented their decision-making just a little bit better. Or sought a second opinion, or a third opinion, or talked to the ethics committee, or personally called up the attorney general of North Dakota to drop by the hospital, or who even knows, the point is, they want to believe that this could never happen to them, and that means they need a reason to believe that what happened to me was because I was a bad doctor.”
My voice was getting a little ragged around the edges.
“You’ll find something soon,” my dad said.
“Belleville Options Specialty Clinic probably still wants to hire me,” I said. “The weather might be better.”
“You’d be even farther from home.”
“Minot isn’t home anymore, Dad. Not for me.”
We sat there silently for a minute and I pulled myself together and said, “Well, I basically just called to vent, so thank you.”
“Anytime, Liz.”
“I’ll talk to you Sunday. Love you.”
“Love you too.”
The phone rang within seconds, and I picked up thinking it was my dad calling back, but instead an unfamiliar voice said, “Dr. Gwinn? My name is Sarah Smith. I’m with the Prairie Spring Home Birth Collective. We’re mostly midwives, but we’re looking for an obstetrician to contract with and we heard you were looking for a job.”
This wasn’t anything I’d applied for, but I cleared my throat and sat up straight in my seat. “I am, yes,” I said. “I don’t … you do realize I haven’t ever done home births.”
“Right, right, what we’re looking for is a physician to provide backup in cases where prenatal care gets a little complicated, but not in a way that rules out a home delivery—like if a woman needs a prescription for antibiotics, say.”
Certified nurse-midwives can prescribe antibiotics, which meant this was probably a group of direct-entry midwives. You could get licensure in Minnesota to be a midwife without the nurse training, but I couldn’t remember what sort of training they required for that.
“Where did you get my number?” I asked.
“Your coworker Jennifer in Minot.” Jennifer was one of the labor nurses. I guess it made sense she might be friends with a direct-entry midwifery group. “Why don’t you just come right now?”
“Wait, to interview?”
“I’ll be honest with you, we want to hire someone quickly,” she said. “I was thinking maybe if you came over and chatted, I could reassure you about us, and get just a little bit of a feel for you.…”
“I just finished a job interview,” I said.
“Oh!… Well, look, I promise that if you get that job and leave us, we won’t hold it against you. If you sign on for just a month, that’ll get us out of our bind, at least for now. And you could probably continue part-time, if you wanted.…”
I thought about my depleted savings and dwindling bank balance—defense lawyers and expert witnesses and all the rest did not work cheap. My rent was due next week. “What’s your address?” I asked.
* * *
SARAH SENT ME TO a location in Minneapolis. “It’s not going to look like an office,” she warned, and she was correct: it just looked like a house. I pulled up and pulled out my phone to text her to be sure, but she was already out and waving at me. I put my phone away and followed her inside.
Sarah was younger than me, a white woman with light brown hair that some areas (not Minnesota) would say was blond, in a long braid down her back. The living room looked a little like it had been staged by a real estate company, with cheap but pristine furniture. “Have a seat,” Sarah said, waving me at the fake leather sofa. “I’m going to get myself some tea. Can I offer you any?”
“No, thank you,” I said.
“Coffee, then? Or how about a homemade soda? We just got one of those gadgets for the office that makes homemade soda, I’d love to show it off.”
“Sure,” I said.
“Do you like citrus flavors?”
“Sounds good,” I said.
She returned with a cup of tea and a short glass of soda, no ice. I sipped it politely—it was fine—and set it down. “So I’ve looked over your resume,” she said. “One thing that caught my eye was that you volunteered in Haiti?”
Doctors don’t usually put their resumes up on LinkedIn—I’d done it on my lawyer’s advice, ahead of the trial. “I did a residency rotation there, with a medical nonprofit,” I said. “I’ve been back a few times with a group that specializes in repair of obstetric fistulas.”
Sarah leaned forward with interest. “I knew another doctor who went there who said she learned all sorts of things doctors here generally don’t know how to do. Like how to do spinal anesthesia.”
“Spinal anesthesia is actually pretty straightforward, but I wouldn’t be able to do it for home births,” I said, a little confused as to why she was bringing this up.
“Oh, of course not,” she said. “I just thought it was interesting—doctors in the US tend to be so specialized. Can you tell me a little about your care philosophy?”
I started to talk about autonomy in choices, listening to my patients, empowerment. With horror, I realized that I was slurring my words. What the hell, I thought. I sat up a little straighter and took a deep breath, only to feel a wave of nausea.
“Oh my God,” I said. The words didn’t come out properly, and I thought, They’re going to think I’m drunk. “I’m feeling sick. Is there—is there a bathroom?”
“Just sit there a minute,” Sarah said, calmly, her hands cupped around her tea. “I’m sure it’ll pass.”
I’m not sick.
There’s something in the soda.
I scrabbled for my cell phone, thinking, I need to call for help, I need to call—
The phone dropped from my fingers like wet spaghetti off a shaky fork.
* * *
THE WORLD DIDN’T GO dark, exactly; it went blurry. I was going through a list of likely drugs in my head, trying to figure out what they’d given me—Rohypnol? Chloral hydrate?—and realized I was doing it out loud. I felt the sting of an injection and my body went even more limp than it already had. Muscle relaxant, I thought, or maybe another sedative. “She can still hear us,” Sarah’s voice said.
The blast of cold outside air and then the musty smell of a car heater. A too-cheerful radio voice talking about college basketball scores. The smell of burgers and fries.
A gas station, neon lit, sometime in the night.
I wasn’t playing helpless at first, but by the time we arrived at the gas station, I was sufficiently conscious to think about trying to escape. I didn’t know where we were, exactly, just that this was a gas station, so there might be other people around, and the car was stopped. I tried to look around, to figure out what I needed to do to escape my … I didn’t want to say the word kidnappers in my head, but obviously I knew that’s what they were.
I was in the back seat of a minivan, and no one else was in the minivan with me. I unbuckled my seat belt; that was obviously the first step. The door was a sliding door, and it didn’t move when I tried to open it. I looked around for the unlock button; it didn’t do anything. Would the window roll down? Could I escape that way?
“Sarah! You’d better hurry!” I heard a man’s voice call from outside the car.
The door slid open. Even drugged up, I was determined to fight. I kicked out with my feet as hard as I could and heard an oof as I connected, and then I flung myself out of the car to try to run. Only, my feet weren’t quite listening to me and instead of running, I found myself falling.
The asphalt was rough against my face and I struggled to push myself to sitting, but my body didn’t seem to know up from down. My voice still worked, at least. “Help!” I yelled. “Help! I’m being kidnapped, help!”
There were other people at the gas station; I glimpsed a concerned face, but when Sarah and the man with her laughed apologetically and said, “Yeah, we’re on our way to rehab for her, again,” the face smiled in relief and turned away as the man and Sarah lifted me back into the car, buckled me in again, and drove away.
“That was too close,” the man said. “I thought you said the sedation would last till morning.”
“Well, it did,” Sarah said. “She didn’t get anywhere, did she?”
“Those people might remember us. If word goes out.”
“Unlikely. Anyway, at least this way she can have something to eat.” She turned back toward me. “You want some food? That’s what I was doing while you were trying to make a break for it, getting you some food.” She was affronted, like I was acting ungrateful.
“Is it drugged?” I asked.
“No.”
She had a hot dog, a bag of Bugles, and one of those smoothie drinks that comes in a plastic bottle, which was, in fact, still sealed. And I was extremely hungry. She had water, too, and since that was also in a sealed bottle, I grudgingly drank it.
Copyright © 2026 by Naomi Kritzer
