It was about midnight in June 2022 when police officers showed up at Angela Collier’s door and told her that someone anonymously requested a welfare check because they thought she might have had a miscarriage.
Standing in front of the concrete steps of her home in Midway, Texas, Collier, initially barefoot and wearing a baggy gray T-shirt, told officers she planned to see a doctor in the morning because she had been bleeding.
Police body camera footage obtained by KFF Health News through an open records request shows that the officers then told Collier — who was 29 at the time and enrolled in online classes to study psychology — to turn around.
Instead of taking her to get medical care, they handcuffed and arrested her because she had outstanding warrants in a neighboring county for failing to appear in court to face misdemeanor drug charges three weeks earlier. She had missed that court date, medical records show, because she was at a hospital receiving treatment for pregnancy complications.
Despite her symptoms and being about 13 weeks pregnant, Collier spent the next day and a half in the Walker County Jail, about 80 miles north of Houston. She said her bleeding worsened there and she begged repeatedly for medical attention that she didn’t receive, according to a formal complaint she filed with the Texas Commission on Jail Standards.
So will the cops be charged for fetacide?
No, cops don’t face repercussions.
She’ll be charged with it because she let the baby die by resisting something or other…
All according to plan
I’m trying to wrap my head around a plan that creates forced birth in order to create a bigger theatre of greater suffering and death.
The pr is that you’re trying to apply logic to it
Bloodlust is without logic
Well hey at least in Alabama you’ll have to release pregnant women from jail since that would be unlawful imprisonment of an innocent child, right? … Right?
There is… A LOT to unpack here. I want to address multiple points here, but know that my background is that I am a professional at, and frequently deal with, first trimester bleeding.
First off, anonymous welfare check for miscarriage. Welfare checks have their role, this is not their role. I do wonder, though, if this was a false pretense provided by the police. Obviously, she had warrants. Multiple, as the plurality in the original post implies. The welfare check might have been a pretense to arrest her for the warrant(s).
Let’s address the warrant(s) next. Missed court date because she was in the hospital receiving medical care. Very reasonable. Very easy to submit documentation to the courts to receive a retrial. Mail it in, day trip, whatever. This is a basic necessity of our judicial system. Fail to do that? You get warrant(s) and arrested.
I’m not addressing the drug aspect. Whether it’s weed dust or a kilo of cocaine, it doesn’t change the rest of this story.
Okay, so now she’s in the holding cell, requesting medical treatment. Let me address the medical perspective. First trimester bleeds are rarely life threatening. They can threaten the pregnancy, but nothing will be done in first trimester. Saying her “bleeding worsened” is very nonspecific. That being said, this is a condition that obviously required medical evaluation. The officers can say they evaluated for the extent of bleeding by how many pads she was going through, how soaked they are, etc. Maybe a judge will find that reasonable. Most police I know can recognize hemorrhage, which obviously hindsight tells us it was not. But police are not medical professionals, and we should not ask that of them. There is a way to bring her to an ER in custody for this evaluation, to be returned to jail after being deemed stable. By the post, they did not do this.
So in summary, while this may be touted as a Roe v Wade conversation, this is much more complex and has many other intricacies than simply abortion law.
Edit: I read the full article after creating this comment from the text in the post. She actually did receive medical evaluation. They had a nurse in the jail evaluate her and deemed her stable and not hemorrhaging. I’m not sure an emergency department would do anything more than the same evaluation, maybe an ultrasound which wouldn’t really change things.
Dude, I’m just gonna chime in and say, I’m a critical care nurse and I am 100% NOT qualified to deem a bleeding pregnant woman stable. I’m not OB trained. I have no idea how to assess that.
I have no confidence that a jail nurse would be competent to make that determination either.
There are many different variations on “stable”. I don’t know you, but I haven’t met a critical care nurse who doesn’t recognize a hypotensive and tachycardic patient as unstable. That’s more what I’m getting at with “stable”. Mostly that’s what the management of first trimester bleeds are. Hemodynamic stability from hemorrhage or sepsis from retained products. Those are pretty common for ICU management, but are very rare in first trimester, so you probably haven’t seen a lot of those.
I’m not one to compliment jail nurses and have seen lots of their screw ups.
I would be completely comfortable declaring her unstable if I saw those signs. I would not be comfortable declaring her stable if I didn’t see them because I don’t know what else I should be assessing and I have no experience to guide me in how quickly or not quickly a patient in her condition can decompensate. I think I personally would have defaulted to sending her to an ED for further (and better) evaluation.
