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.
We all know why they didn’t do it, and your willful ignorance is telling.
Alright, since you want me to say what it was, it sounds like a medical error to me.
thanks for going to the mat with that lunatic, you may have helped distract them from whatever other bullshit they were planning. abortion is health care. denying abortion is denying health care.
You bet!
Exposing the moral depravity of reactionaries is kind of a pet project of mine.