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.
Yes.
That’s the problem with this law.
It takes the decision away from the medical experts, and puts in the hands of lawyers and judges who may or may not have a different agenda.
The lawyers/judges would want to throw physicians in prison? And as of 2023, no doctors had actually been arrested for doing this. Actually, at least one got a case dismissed after the fact.
I can see you’re clearly not interested in understanding the situation the physician was in or discussing solutions that would have saved this patient’s life.
I’m not going to debate you further.
The article says what would have saved her life, so I didn’t think that was at issue here. But alright. It was good talking to you, and I hope you have a good day.