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.

  • Flying Squid
    122•23 days ago

    I wish the world was unwelcoming to right-wing viewpoints. This is the result and so many people are fine with it. It’s so depressing.

    • @[email protected]
      24•23 days ago

      Unfortunately you’ll have to get used to it and continue challenging them. The polycrisis is only going to get worse and the number of refugees from the impact of climate change and climate change related causes i.e. conflict from collapsing food / water access and / or failed states.

      In the next 10 to 20 years life quality will peak and then will start collapsing over the next 50.

      When that happens a significant cohort of the population will close ranks and want to “protect” those closest around them, the desire the ultra-rich have for isolation will continue to trickle down into the rich and remnants of the upper middle class as the wealth gap widens. In times of crisis this cohort pushes further and further right.

      So keep working against these forces so we can get the rich to pay their fair share to fix these problems but be prepared to take up arms when the house of cards that is the relative stability we have now collapses.