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.
Pussy ass doctors violating their hippocratic oath. The Texas law may have pit them in a “gray” area legally, bit they killed her because they thought it was less likely to get them in trouble.
It wouldn’t have put them in a gray area. They would have been arrested for murder. How many more patients did the doctor save that day? That week? That month?
The answer isn’t to ask doctors to be jailed for practicing medicine. That only harms everyone else they serve. The answer is not having draconian laws in place that force doctors to choose between serving one patient at the expense of all their other and future patients.