- cross-posted to:
- politics@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- politics@beehaw.org
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 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.
I wouldn’t “want” that, and besides, the law would have allowed that in this case. This is a simple medical mistake, the likes of which was the third leading cause of death in 2018.
And far more human beings die when abortions are legal. You can “reframe” that however you want it, but that’s a fact. Unless you’d like to argue that fetuses/babies aren’t human? Or are you going to apply an arbitrary standard of “personhood” to protect your genocidal ideas?
You can call abortion access a genocide, but that doesn’t make it true.
You can try to reframe the issue, as many reactionaries do, but you should be aware that the Nazis also restricted abortion for “aryans”:
It’s about controlling women for patriarchal purposes, and you’re helping that cause.
How is killing millions of innocent people every year not genocide? If they’re not people, then can you define “person”? Dehumanizing people to justify killing them was a tactic the Nazis used, too. It’s a favorite of people who protest in favor of abortion.
Leave it to reactionaries to confuse healthcare with genocide.
I’ve already told you that autonomous people should get to choose what to do with their bodies. That’s clearly not a value that you hold, and want to give a fetus extra rights above and beyond the person upon whose body they depend.
You wouldn’t need to give a reason to disconnect the person attached to you by the kidney; it’s your body to decide to share or not.
You can try to reframe the issue, but the facts are clear.