‘It Was The Only Option’: Mother Denied Life-Saving Abortion In Oklahoma Travels Out-Of-State For Care

One Oklahoma mother says strict abortion laws forced her to travel 600 miles in order to receive a life-saving abortion.

Magon Hoffman’s doctors in Oklahoma were unsure if they could provide her the care she needed.

Hoffman found out she was pregnant in late 2022, and was ecstatic to add to her family.

“We were over the moon,” Hoffman, who already had a three-year-old daughter at the time, said.

One night in November, around her 14th week, everything changed.

“I woke up several hours later and I was covered in blood,” Hoffman said. “At that point I knew I had a blood clot.”

At her 20-week ultrasound, things only got worse. Hoffman’s fetus had anencephaly, meaning it had no skull or brain.

According to the CDC, 1 in every 4,600 babies is born with anencephaly in the U.S. Most babies born with anencephaly die shortly after birth, the CDC says, and there is no known cure or treatment.

“There was no chance that she would live,” Hoffman said. “There wasn’t even a 0.1 percent chance that she would even make it out of the hospital.”

With her own life at risk, and a toddler at home, Hoffman had to make a hard choice.

“The one thing that I couldn’t justify was, how could my husband ever look at my daughter and have to explain that I didn’t take the safest route to keep her mom alive,” Hoffman said.

With Oklahoma’s strict abortion ban that was passed in 2022, her doctors said they couldn’t perform the abortion.

“He told me that if I chose to terminate the pregnancy, I wouldn’t be able to do it in the state of Oklahoma,” Hoffman said. “It’s already such a scary situation to be in, and then you add in this layer with laws that were seemingly drafted without women in mind.”

Hoffman and her husband traveled to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where she received her abortion.

Hoffman says she couldn’t afford to wait when her life was on the line.

“It was the only option,” Hoffman said. “I say it was the risk I was willing to take, but there was never a doubt in my mind that it was what I had to do.”

It cost her thousands of dollars and months of her life, but the emotional toll was even greater.

“It was just a really, really tough, really dark time,” Hoffman said.

Now Hoffman wants to see a change in Oklahoma, for her daughter’s sake.

“I’m not even doing my job as a mom if I’m not doing anything I can in hopes that, even in the smallest way, it can make things better for her than it was for me,” Hoffman said.

We also reached out to the representative who was involved in writing Oklahoma's abortion laws for her reaction to cases like Magon's, as Magon said she feared for her own life because of the blood clot. 

Representative Cindy Rowe says she believes Oklahoma's laws are clear. 

"A baby that is born with some other microcephaly or brain development abnormality, if there's something that comes up in that pregnancy that is going to affect the life of the mother, that's already covered," she said.