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.
This is fucking barbaric. The hospital let her sit for 40 hours with a fetus hanging out of her uterus. Just take a moment to imagine what that alone must have felt like aside from the emotional horror of losing a pregnancy. We wouldn’t even imagine treating pets or livestock this way but it’s clear that these repugnant forced-birthers don’t consider women to be people. One little pill to speed up the labor that her body already decided was needed was all that was required to keep this woman alive. What’s the point of even having healthcare when we can’t rely on it.
A texas woman didn’t die, a texas woman was murdered by the state’s ignorant, bigoted, christo-fascist policy - abbott, patrick, cruz, gohmert, that cock eyed AG and the rest of them along with every complicit texas republican voter… they all have blood on their cowardly hands.
Ok, and? What consequences are they going to face? How will their quality of life be diminished in any way?
I’ll answer for you: none, because we, the little people, do not matter. Period.
I have been sharpening my guillotine … It could fix some things
Comments like these do less than nothing. We need to actually go outside and organize against the people taking our freedoms away. Protests, signing petitions, civil disobedience, even just donating goes a hell of a lot farther than writing comments on the internet.
Oh completely agree… I’m also just having a laugh
Many noted a striking similarity to the case of Savita Halappavanar, a 31-year-old woman who died of septic shock in 2012 after providers in Ireland refused to empty her uterus while she was miscarrying at 17 weeks. When she begged for care, a midwife told her, “This is a Catholic country.” The resulting investigation and public outcry galvanized the country to change its strict ban on abortion.
But in the wake of deaths related to abortion access in the United States, leaders who support restricting the right have not called for any reforms.
My country’s aptitude for remaining entirely unmoved by preventable tragedies that utterly upend political trajectories in other nations has become one of our most globally defining traits.
Its the downside of being a melting-pot: too many different worldviews. The Australians could get together and ban guns, the Irish could fight for women’s rights. Here, if one side of the country tries to enact change the other side will fight tooth and nail to stop it.
Supreme Court scandal
Gun violence
Police brutality
Politicized natural disaster relief
Food insecurity
Homelessness
Drug epidemic
Pregnancy mortality
And, last but not least:Fascist attempted coup
America: 🤷♂️
Many noted a striking similarity to the case of Savita Halappavanar, a 31-year-old woman who died of septic shock in 2012 after providers in Ireland refused to empty her uterus while she was miscarrying at 17 weeks. When she begged for care, a midwife told her, “This is a Catholic country.” The resulting investigation and public outcry galvanized the country to change its strict ban on abortion.
And that’s the difference between a sane country and America. We don’t even blink when children are murdered in schools- we sure as shit aren’t going to do anything about dead women.
I don’t understand how a miscarriage counts as abortion. The baby literally died in the womb. This law is sickening. My sister-in-law had a miscarriage last year and it’s scary to think that she could lose her life by trying to become a mother. The crazy part is her religion essentially tells women they aren’t fulfilling their duty to God if they don’t become a mother. (Mormon)
For them, abortion is extinguishing a life. In this case, the fetus, although no longer viable due to mechanical impossibility BUT still connected to the umbilical cord and inside the placenta, gave it a heartbeat. Any human intervention that would cause that heartbeat to go away, such as inducing labor, manual or physical extraction, or even manual dilation of the cervix, since the fetus being way too young to survive outside of the mother, would end up being the cause of that heartbeat going away, and thus, murder, in their eyes. All they “can” do is “Let nature run its course”
It is beyond stupid, cruel and horrible. Those laws are actively killing people through neglect.
Edit: Miscarriage does not mean the fetus “died”, it merely means failure to carry to term or to point where the fetus can survive outside of the mother, which is usually flagged at 20 weeks. When labour started, at an unsustainable pregnancy length, it is counted as a miscarriage because the fetus can’t survive on it’s own, however it was not a spontaneous abortion because there was still a heartbeat.
there’s another thread about outsiders’ criticisms of lemmy, and one of the comments mentioned that it’s “unwelcoming to right wing viewpoints”
I WONDER FUCKING WHY
let’s keep it that way, the right-wing should be unwelcome everywhere
1000%. So long as right-wing equates to racist, seditious, traitorous bastards, then yeah…you’re not welcome here or anywhere else in this country. Go find Jesus or something.
Vote Kamala Harris and your sisters, wives and daughters might stop dying for lack of health care when pregnant. Allow Trump to regain power and it will get much, much worse for the women you care about.
What is the course of action that you expect Kamala to take that would prevent this situation in Texas? And if you have one, why hasn’t Biden done it already?
Win the WH, win both houses of Congress, blow up the filibuster and enact national protections for abortion.
Will it work? Probably not. It definitely won’t happen if Trump wins, though.
Plus if Trump wins, Alito and Thomas retire and get replaced by 25 year old fascists and things get even worse for decades.
I dunno if you were being sincere or intentionally obtuse, but it’s kind of straightforward that we have to win.
I am not American, nor the person you responded to, but in 2020 the Democrats won the white house, the Senate, and the House of Representatives.
As an outsider looking in, why is there the expectation that Kamala doing it again in 2024 will have a different result?
Back in 2020, I read op-eds from several pundits who worried that choosing Biden was a mistake, as he ran on a platform essentially of returning politics to “normal.” They worried that once he won, people would settle back into the old routines, and forget about the simmering fascist threat and do diddly about it. I remember this well, because I feared the same.
That’s pretty much what happened. Credit to the House January 6th special committee for finally forcing Merrick Garland to get off his ass and do a something about the insurrection… 2 years later. (Which made it easy to delay the trial until after the next election.) That’s about it, though. Hell, this wasn’t difficult to predict, given the way that Obama decided to “look forward” and not hold Bush administration officials accountable for their crimes.
That is to say, if Harris wins, I predict more of the same. Folks on the blue side will breathe a sigh of relief, make excuses for why they can’t act, and do their best to forget about it until the next most-important-election-in-history. We (Americans) don’t have a plan to deal with it, and they’ll instead just get angry and call you and me disingenuous, or Russian bots, for pointing it out.
Just republican shit.
Texas state law allows abortion in cases of medical emergencies. The hospital was absolutely in the wrong here.
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.
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.
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 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:
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.
This would mean it was legal to perform an abortion. They should have known about this risk.
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.
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 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.
The hospital knew that they had to protect themselves against the jagoffs who prosecute people who provide women with healthcare.
The law is what created this situation; if the doctors and hospital administration didn’t have to worry about the fascists in the State government, this never would have been an issue.
Or do you just think the doctors didn’t perform the procedure because they didn’t feel like it?
The law is perfectly clear in allowing this. I’m not going to guess why they didn’t do it, but your point is like arguing a cop watching a mass shooting happen right in front of him would be right to blame the law against excessive use of force if he chose not to kill the mass shooter even though there was an explicit clause saying it would have been permitted.
Hundreds of doctors and their lawyers disagree with you. Of course they could provide medical services, and see if local law enforcement decides to arrest them and lock them up. Or they could withhold medical services, because that’s what their lawyers say is a reasonable interpretation of the law.
In other words, it doesn’t really matter what you or I think. It matters what doctors and their lawyers believe is likely to occur. And we know what that is, because they’re telling us out loud, and they’re showing us through their actions.
Of course you’re entitled to interpret the law however you want to. I think many of us have done that over time, and sometimes we realize that we got it wrong, because we see that lawyers and courts don’t agree with us. Probably this is one of the times that you need to recognize what’s actually happening, and realize that your wishful thinking is just that. I’m sure many people would be happier if reality matched your thoughts, but it doesn’t.
Can you please tell me how this is confusing:
Sec. 171.002. DEFINITIONS. In this chapter:
(3) “Medical emergency” means a life-threatening physical condition aggravated by, caused by, or arising from a pregnancy that, as certified by a physician, places the woman in danger of death or a serious risk of substantial impairment of a major bodily function unless an abortion is performed.
…
Sec. 171.0124. EXCEPTION FOR MEDICAL EMERGENCY. A physician may perform an abortion without obtaining informed consent under this subchapter in a medical emergency. A physician who performs an abortion in a medical emergency shall:
(1) include in the patient’s medical records a statement signed by the physician certifying the nature of the medical emergency; and
(2) not later than the 30th day after the date the abortion is performed, certify to the department the specific medical condition that constituted the emergency.
You do know that medical errors happens, right? People die from them all the time. This seems like a pretty clear-cut case of it.
It wasn’t a “medical error.”
It was the State of Texas intimidating doctors into not performing life-saving healthcare.
You can try to reframe it all you want, but this it the truth of the situation.
How is any of that legal text “intimidating”?
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.
