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.
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.
The article states it, itself. It would have been a “gray area” of the law.
But that’s barely even true itself. If you want it straight fromm the horses mouth, here it is in black and white from texas’ own state law library.
"Abortions are banned, with certain exceptions Chapter 170A of the Texas Health & Safety Code prohibits abortions outright, except in certain circumstances.
Section 170A.002 prohibits a person from performing, inducing, or attempting an abortion. There is an exception for situations in which the life or health of the pregnant patient is at risk. In order for the exception to apply, three factors must be met:
A licensed physician must perform the abortion. The patient must have a life-threatening condition and be at risk of death or “substantial impairment of a major bodily function” if the abortion is not performed. “Substantial impairment of a major bodily function” is not defined in this chapter. The physician must try to save the life of the fetus unless this would increase the risk of the pregnant patient’s death or impairment."
So it is absolutely impossible to save a 17 week fetus that has already flipped and is down in the position this fetus was in. It’s life could in no way be saved. Then, what is obviously apparent is that the mothers condition was risking her life.
So yes, by texas law they could have saved the woman. As to how many lives that doctor would save if he were still arrested or lost his license(skipping the debate of if theyd be arrested or not), probably extremely few. Their patients wouldn’t just no longer get medical care. Their patients would see a different doctor. So the only patients saved would be patients that this doctor could have figured something out to save them, that most other doctors would have missed, and I’ma go out on a limb here and guess we aren’t talking about someone like Dr.House.
But you know what would have saved many more lives? Showing that it’s OK to use that law to save a person with an unviable fetus before it kills another 50 women.