Via ProPublica: A Texas Woman Died After the Hospital Said It Would be a “Crime” to Intervene in Her Miscarriage.
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.
You can call this outcome a whole lot of thing, including gut-wrenching, sad, and infuriating, but you can’t call it “pro-life.”
Barnica is one of at least two Texas women who ProPublica found lost their lives after doctors delayed treating miscarriages, which fall into a gray area under the state’s strict abortion laws that prohibit doctors from ending the heartbeat of a fetus.
As a husband and a father and, really, simply as a human being, I cannot imagine the pain of thinking you are about to have a new child, having to then go through a miscarriage only to have the law block the ability of doctors to save your wife from dying.
It is just unacceptably awful. And yet, here we are.
Last month, ProPublica told the stories of two Georgia women, Amber Thurman and Candi Miller, whose deaths were deemed “preventable” by the state’s maternal mortality review committee after they were unable to access legal abortions and timely medical care amid an abortion ban.
Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp called the reporting “fear mongering.” Former President Donald Trump has not weighed in — except to joke that his Fox News town hall on women’s issues would get “better ratings” than a press call where Thurman’s family spoke about their pain.
Let me underscore and note the link to the story of Trump, in fact, making a joke about his ratings versus those of a family press conference about their loss and the consequences of the law he helped come into being.
I grew up in Evangelical circles wherein abortion is seen to be a simple issue. But, clearly, it is not. Women’s health and well-being are on the line and we need to understand that fact.
One cruel fact is that even if one thinks that it is paramount to get rid of abortion and therefore all of this suffering is just necessary collateral damage, the evidence suggests that getting rid of Roe hasn’t actually led to fewer abortions. Via the AP: US abortion numbers have risen slightly since Roe was overturned, study finds.
