Josseli Barnica is one of at least two pregnant Texas women who died after doctors delayed emergency care. She’d told her husband that the medical team said it couldn’t act until the fetal heartbeat stopped.

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_toast_is_gone
    -6•2 months ago

    Please see my reply to your other comment. I don’t see how this has anything to do with science and doctors rather than some idiot giving fatally bad legal advice.

      • @the_toast_is_gone
        -3•2 months ago

        I did. Here’s how I replied:

        That threat was because she could have sought a C-section. If I’m understanding this page correctly, one’s fertility is reduced by about 13% after a C-section. If I’m not, feel free to show me how I got it wrong. Did that guy ever end up prosecuting anyone involved, though? Why would a judge side with the prosecution after a court literally gave her an order permitting her to do that?

        Elaborating further, though the odds of the baby surviving past the first year are only 5-10%, its life should still be preserved if possible. People can and do elect to have surgery despite a low chance of survival.

        • @[email protected]English
          1•2 months ago

          why did you link an article on trisomy-18?

          Trisomy 18, also called Edwards syndrome, is a chromosomal condition associated with abnormalities in many parts of the body. Individuals with trisomy 18 often have slow growth before birth (intrauterine growth retardation) and a low birth weight. Affected individuals may have heart defects and abnormalities of other organs that develop before birth. Other features of trisomy 18 include a small, abnormally shaped head; a small jaw and mouth; and clenched fists with overlapping fingers. Due to the presence of several life-threatening medical problems, many individuals with trisomy 18 die before birth or within their first month. Five to 10 percent of children with this condition live past their first year, and these children often have severe intellectual disability.

          • @the_toast_is_gone
            -1•2 months ago

            I linked it because the abortion that happened in your article happened because of it:

            Cox’s fetus was diagnosed on Nov. 27 with trisomy 18, a genetic abnormality that usually results in miscarriage, stillbirth or death soon after birth.