Candace Fails screamed for someone in the Texas hospital to help her pregnant daughter. “Do something,” she pleaded, on the morning of Oct. 29, 2023.
Nevaeh Crain was crying in pain, too weak to walk, blood staining her thighs. Feverish and vomiting the day of her baby shower, the 18-year-old had gone to two different emergency rooms within 12 hours, returning home each time worse than before.
The first hospital diagnosed her with strep throat without investigating her sharp abdominal cramps. At the second, she screened positive for sepsis, a life-threatening and fast-moving reaction to an infection, medical records show. But doctors said her six-month fetus had a heartbeat and that Crain was fine to leave.
Now on Crain’s third hospital visit, an obstetrician insisted on two ultrasounds to “confirm fetal demise,” a nurse wrote, before moving her to intensive care.
By then, more than two hours after her arrival, Crain’s blood pressure had plummeted and a nurse had noted that her lips were “blue and dusky.” Her organs began failing.
Hours later, she was dead.
Fails, who would have seen her daughter turn 20 this Friday, still cannot understand why Crain’s emergency was not treated like an emergency.
But that is what many pregnant women are now facing in states with strict abortion bans, doctors and lawyers have told ProPublica.
It’s the sort of systematic coldness that comes with procedure. Like even at that last place where she got to the ICU, the nurse “insisted on two ultrasounds to confirm fetal demise”. So clearly the hospital has tried making some “reasonable” procedure, and the nurse wanting to confirm thought “we’ll just quickly get this out of the way” or something.
It’s horrible seeing politics and especially religious political views causing such regression in our modern age where it’s completely needless.
It’s the fear of losing everything that gives these people pause. I hope I’d do better in that situation, but I don’t know what it’s like to face losing everything you worked for in your life as well as your freedom.
The people to blame are the monsters who created these laws.
If you preform the needed procedures your a felon, subject to hundreds of thousands in fines and multiple years of jail. While clearly the net moral shing to do is save the life, its a stupid choice to put on anyone. The laws are evil and so are its supporters
Yeah, it is. And then they think they can afford the thing theyre doing, because they don’t see the sum of all of the others doing the same to the patient.
I’ve experienced something… similar. Not on the same scale, but still.
The banality of evil.