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.
The woman died of sepsis. It’s extremely likely when you have a dead or dying fetus hemorrhagically working its way out of a uterus, but until you have it, you don’t. By the time people realize what’s going on, it’s often too late.
The law is disgusting because it is medically uninformed and constraining, and it assumes anyone considering abortion is just some gleefully slutty baby murderer.
From the article:
This would mean it was legal to perform an abortion. They should have known about this risk.
I am trying to work on being less confrontational on here, but it really feels like you are being willfully obtuse. Playing devil’s advocate for you, it seems like you are struggling with the gap between the text of the law and the enforcement context of the law. In this case there is a very wide gap between the two.
You aren’t going to change any minds here by arguing that the law technically allows abortions in this case. The issue is the enforcement and underlying context of the law.
I think the text of the law is quite plain. It’s not a huge reach to imagine that this is yet another terrible instance of a medial error. Hundreds of thousands of people die every year because of them. If you want to talk about enforcement, then we have at least one case of a doctor having a lawsuit against him dismissed after he was accused of providing an abortion. Also, as of 2023, nobody had been arrested for providing an abortion.
I appreciate you trying to see things from my perspective, but the facts of the case seem pretty clear to me. Arguing that this is because of the abortion law doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. If the law says “you can shoot someone if they invade your home,” much the same as this law does, it’s not the legislators’ fault if I freeze up when my home is invaded and die. Medical error, either because of bad legal advice or a poor understanding of medicine, is more reasonable as an explanation.
If the facts of the case are clear to you but they aren’t clear to doctors who actually live and work in the state, and are risking getting locked up for years or decades, and large hospitals that are part of gigantic corporations that have expensive lawyers working for them, maybe it’s because they know more than you, or maybe it’s because they are more worried about being cautious, because they know that the cops and the DAs down there are eager to arrest people.
All of which is to say, we don’t even have to look at the text of the law, because people are telling us the actual effect of the law. You’re pounding the statute but the statute’s not the problem. The enforcement of the statute is the problem. So you can keep on pounding it, but your energies are misdirected.
If the law is being interpreted in court in such a way that the text of the law is being ignored for the sake of scoring more convictions, the state of Texas is begging to be smacked down for doing so. And that smackdown would be perfectly justified. The longer this obviously incorrect interpretation of the law goes unchallenged, the longer it will cause a chilling effect on the medical community that is truly trying to save lives. No, it is not easy to be the tip of the spear, but the state of Texas would owe them a great debt.
Yes they should have but didn’t because of a vague law that does not lay out exactly when the mothers life is in danger. Does she have to be in pain? Conscious? Bleeding? Irregular heartbeat? Does the fetus have to viable? The law does not allow for interpretation so hospitals literally have to wait until the women is in cardiac arrest to act. So yes if this women was in any normal state with normal defined laws that don’t restrict how doctors decide what their patients need. So yes they should have acted but couldn’t.
The 2017 law allowed abortions in emergencies as defined in Section 171.002, Health and Safety Code. This is what it says:
“As certified by a physician” means the physician can decide whether this is a life-threatening emergency.
https://www.reuters.com/legal/texas-judge-allows-woman-get-emergency-abortion-despite-state-ban-2023-12-07/
Hmmmmm it’s like the religious right nut jobs don’t trust science and doctors.
Please see my reply to your other comment. I don’t see how this has anything to do with science and doctors rather than some idiot giving fatally bad legal advice.
Did you read the article?
I did. Here’s how I replied:
Elaborating further, though the odds of the baby surviving past the first year are only 5-10%, its life should still be preserved if possible. People can and do elect to have surgery despite a low chance of survival.
why did you link an article on trisomy-18?