Michael Hiltzik: Anti-abortion agitators are trying to cripple a lifesaving federal health care law

Here's how the legal departments of two hospitals, legislators in two states and even the Supreme Court turned a pregnancy emergency for Mylissa Farmer into a life-threatening nightmare.

Farmer, 41, was 18 weeks into her pregnancy when her water broke prematurely. Her doctor instructed her to go to her local hospital in Joplin, Missouri.

There, the hospital's labor and delivery doctors determined that she had no amniotic fluid left. Her baby had "'zero' chance of survival" and she risked infection, blood loss and even death. The doctors advised her that they could help her undergo an "inevitable miscarriage," or she could wait, at risk to her life.

She chose the former, and then the hospital's legal department stepped in. Although Missouri's anti-abortion law has exceptions when continuing a pregnancy might cause the mother's death or "irreversible physical impairment," the lawyers determined she was not quite there yet.

The doctors advised Farmer to go out of state, but the only hospital capable of handling her condition was in Kansas, which was then in the thick of a political campaign over a proposed anti-abortion constitutional amendment.

She arrived at the University of Kansas Hospital