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.
In 2006, when I was about 6 years, my mother, sadly, suffered a miscarriage. It devestated our family. This also marked a turning point in my life as my parents divorced not long after. It’s stories like these that make me wonder what would have happened to my dear mother after her miscarriage if the same fundamentalist theocrats were in power then. Would they have arrested her? Would she have died under the same atrocious conditions that Ms. Barnica had to suffer? What will happen to my wife if, goodness forbid, something similar happens to her? This story highlights why, five days from now, you MUST vote. We have make that incidents like these don’t repeat. Don’t just do it for your sake. Do it for the sake of those dearest and nearest to you.