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.

  • @Zombiepirate
    link
    English
    323 days ago

    Avoiding the question is it’s own cowardly answer.

    Reactionaries always try to reframe things exactly backwards.

    • @the_toast_is_gone
      link
      -5
      edit-2
      23 days ago

      I should think it’s more cowardly to insult people without explaining why they’re wrong. Are you so deep in you own pro-genocide propaganda that you can’t even articulate why murder is wrong? And if it’s so cowardly to not respond, then why are you not responding to my questions? Are you calling yourself a coward? If so, I mean, you said it, not me.

      I have just as much ground to call you a reactionary over your reframing of genocide as “healthcare,” which is apparently such an obvious position that you don’t know how to defend it.