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.
I’m sorry but humans refusing to save the life of another human because of an obtuse law is unconscionable. They should have done what needed to be done and let the lawyers sort it out later.
It’s absolutely unconscionable, but it’s a medical (and very stupid/unnecessary) version of the trolley problem.
You’re a doctor. The tracks going one way have a single patient that you can treat and save. The tracks going the other way have every patient you’d get to see over the entirety of the rest of your career - literally thousands of people.
Treat the one and risk an avalanche of legal problems to include losing your license; the literal thousands of people are now fucked. Skip the one under the legal microscope, and she’s for-sure fucked, but your license lives to serve another day.
It’s fucked up. It’s evil. It’s what pro-life gets us.
You cannot expect a doctor to risk their freedom over a single patient. It’s like societal-level triage.
You can expect your lawmakers to not craft the world you live in into a dystopian hellscape… when they fail to live up to that expectation, don’t direct your anger at the people they’ve put into a bind; bring it directly to the lawmakers.