‘The baby is dead, no heartbeat’: South Carolina woman forced to carry dead fetus for 4 weeks, accused of wanting abortion

When South Carolina’s Elizabeth Weber was nine weeks pregnant, she learned that her baby boy – whom she had named Enzo – had stopped growing inside her three weeks earlier. He had no heartbeat. Weber was living the nightmare all over again – she had lost another child at 10 weeks old. But the Donald Trump administration didn’t care and forced her to carry her dead baby inside her for weeks.

Mother to three daughters, Weber was getting ready with her husband, Thomas, to welcome the new baby and was in the process of moving to a bigger place. But then came March 27, 2025, and she was told her baby had stopped growing at 6 weeks and one day. The doctors’ verdict? She was “definitely having a miscarriage,” so she was sent home. But Weber suffered through hyperemesis gravidarum (HG) in all of her pregnancies and continued to feel like she was still pregnant as her “body was not recognizing that I wasn’t pregnant anymore.” The nausea, the tiredness, and every other symptom remained, and she didn’t miscarry naturally.

After three days, she went back to the emergency room to get a D & C (dilation and curettage to clean the uterus) as, combined with her HG, she was getting really sick. But another heartbreaking update awaited them. She had to wait and carry around her dead baby inside her because the “heartbeat bill” – legislation that bans abortion after a fetal heartbeat is detectable – made it illegal to carry out the D&C at that point.

Weber was said to wait for two more weeks and only come back if she experienced heavy bleeding, “like hemorrhaging,” and was also accused of fabricating the death of her baby to get an abortion, something that she shares left her confounded and shaken in her chat with People.

“My baby didn’t have a heartbeat, and it still prevented me from getting care,” she shared, adding that she was grilled on whether the pregnancy was “wanted” or not.

“And I was like, ‘Yes, it’s very much wanted.’ She seemed to be implying that I was trying to sneakily get rid of it. Obviously, that was not the case. I looked at her and literally was like, ’My baby is dead. Every doctor I’ve talked to knows my baby is dead. My baby is not going to magically get a heartbeat.’ “

Weber even posted on TikTok, mourning that “the baby is dead, no heartbeat,” and yet she was being denied the necessary procedures, which could become deadly. On the advice of a patient advocate, she went to another hospital, where she discovered that her WBC was very high, aka the delay in the D&C had caused an infection. But even here, she didn’t get the help she needed, even though she was “still in a ton of pain, but they just sent me home with Oxycodone.”

“I can’t believe that I’m being forced to carry around my dead baby. They know it’s gone, they know it’s dead, they know it’s stopped developing, and now I’m being forced to carry it … there’s really no feeling like when your womb becomes a tomb.”

What made the situation worse was the added financial strain as even her husband couldn’t work as the medical negligence – courtesy of Trump’s draconian anti-abortion rules that don’t have empathy or any logic – occupied their life.

And when she finally got the D&C? The paperwork said it was an “abortion.”

While Weber couldn’t change how the tragedy became a nightmare for her, she is now telling her story to open the eyes of the legal system, to show them how their rigid and dated law is “so dangerous for women.”