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.

  • Aviandelight
    175·
    24 days ago

    This is fucking barbaric. The hospital let her sit for 40 hours with a fetus hanging out of her uterus. Just take a moment to imagine what that alone must have felt like aside from the emotional horror of losing a pregnancy. We wouldn’t even imagine treating pets or livestock this way but it’s clear that these repugnant forced-birthers don’t consider women to be people. One little pill to speed up the labor that her body already decided was needed was all that was required to keep this woman alive. What’s the point of even having healthcare when we can’t rely on it.

    • noneya@lemmy.worldEnglish
      31·
      24 days ago

      God. I agree. This is horrific. And we have the audacity to consider ourselves a first-world country. Texans should immediately take themselves to the state house to demand better. Our tax dollars pay for hospitals to treat us, not to kill us.

    • tabarnaski@sh.itjust.works
      13·
      23 days ago

      Not a lawyer, but I wonder if there a case to be made with letting a woman get an infection and die due to the fear of commiting a crime by killing the baby. In the end, two people died, but one could have survived.