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.
Yeah, they probably were just taking a long lunch instead of treating a patient.
Are you really asking how a law can be intimidating? That’s like… The reason we have laws, man.
Laws can also be misread, and it’s very likely that this was done somehow. The law explicitly allows abortions under these circumstances. Can you explain yourself what’s confusing about it?
There’s nothing confusing about it.
The law is set up to intimate doctors into not performing abortions. The doctors believe they will be second-guessed by Ken Paxton and his merry band of fascists.
You want to reframe it and blame the doctors instead of the draconian law that intimidates healthcare professionals.
There should never have been a restriction in the first place; women should be free to make their own healthcare decisions free from the constraints of theocratic virtue-signaling control freaks.
How is allowing abortions during medical emergencies intimidating? That should be reassuring.
To your second point, what about the fetus/baby’s bodily autonomy? Surely that should be respected as well if it’s likely to survive.
The results speak for themselves if you’re not afraid to interrogate what happened.
But surely you’re more knowledgeable about the law than the lawyers employed by the hospital.
The fetus is not autonomous, so how the fuck can it have autonomy?
I am interrogating what happened. The law allows abortions in cases of medical emergency. Lots of people die because of medical errors every year. It’s not hard to connect the dots.
Do comatose people have bodily autonomy?
Are comatose people relying on somebody else’s organs who might die or suffer grievous injury to keep them alive?
They’re relying on a lot of external support that could be given to other people. They’re often given organ transplants (for which there can be years-long waiting list), blood, etc. that might all be used on someone else. Difficult decisions often have to be made about their viability. Regardless of that, we respect their right to life until it’s absolutely clear that they won’t survive.
So… Not the same case as a fetus at all, right?
If you were hooked up to someone using your kidneys who then died, I bet you wouldn’t want the doctors to have to wait until you had complications from sepsis before disconnecting you.
Because that’s the analogous argument. You keep trying to reframe it, but we know what happens when you put these kinds of restrictions on abortion: women die.
You can pretend otherwise, but the facts are clear.