Josseli Barnica is one of at least two pregnant Texas women who died after doctors delayed emergency care. She’d told her husband that the medical team said it couldn’t act until the fetal heartbeat stopped.

Josseli Barnica grieved the news as she lay in a Houston hospital bed on Sept. 3, 2021: The sibling she’d dreamt of giving her daughter would not survive this pregnancy.

The fetus was on the verge of coming out, its head pressed against her dilated cervix; she was 17 weeks pregnant and a miscarriage was “in progress,” doctors noted in hospital records. At that point, they should have offered to speed up the delivery or empty her uterus to stave off a deadly infection, more than a dozen medical experts told ProPublica.

But when Barnica’s husband rushed to her side from his job on a construction site, she relayed what she said the medical team had told her: “They had to wait until there was no heartbeat,” he told ProPublica in Spanish. “It would be a crime to give her an abortion.”

For 40 hours, the anguished 28-year-old mother prayed for doctors to help her get home to her daughter; all the while, her uterus remained exposed to bacteria.

Three days after she delivered, Barnica died of an infection.

  • atzanteol@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    23·
    16 days ago

    The patient must have a life-threatening condition and be at risk of death or “substantial impairment of a major bodily function” if the abortion is not performed.

    So, therein lies the problem.

    They couldn’t take action before her life was in danger even though they knew it would be. So they have to wait until it’s an “emergency” which is far more risky. And this woman died was a result.

    This law greatly increased the risk of the situation needlessly.

    • the_toast_is_gone@lemmy.world
      114·
      16 days ago

      She died, so that’s an emergency. If someone is having a stroke and somehow doesn’t die until three days later, that doesn’t make it any less an emergency.

      • dgmib@lemmy.world
        5·
        16 days ago

        Do you hear yourself?

        It was an emergency because she died?

        She died days after it was too late for an abortion to save her.

        If they performed the abortion when it would have saved her life, she wouldn’t have died, by your own logic it would’n’ve been an emergency.

        And you’d be here arguing that the doctor should lose his license for performing an abortion when it wasn’t an emergency.

        • the_toast_is_gone@lemmy.world
          19·
          16 days ago

          Yes. If someone is going to die soon after the problem is discovered, it’s an emergency. I don’t think this is a controversial claim. If someone gets hit by a car or has a stroke and has days to live, that doesn’t mean we hold off on providing healthcare so they survive the incident.