Josseli Barnica is one of at least two pregnant Texas women who died after doctors delayed emergency care. She’d told her husband that the medical team said it couldn’t act until the fetal heartbeat stopped.

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.

  • catloaf@lemm.eeEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    It’s confusing because Ken Paxton doesn’t actually care about the law. His goons will show up at your door and accuse you of violating the law whether you did the right thing or not.

    • the_toast_is_gone@lemmy.world
      0·
      2 months ago

      That’s worth watching an innocent person die? Besides, how likely is it that “even though she was literally dying of the infection and the hospital knew it, that didn’t constitute a medical emergency” would hold up in court?