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.

  • @[email protected]
    1•25 days ago

    Can you please tell me how this is a legal minefield:

    Sec. 171.002. DEFINITIONS. In this chapter:

    (3) “Medical emergency” means a life-threatening physical condition aggravated by, caused by, or arising from a pregnancy that, as certified by a physician, places the woman in danger of death or a serious risk of substantial impairment of a major bodily function unless an abortion is performed.

    …

    Sec. 171.0124. EXCEPTION FOR MEDICAL EMERGENCY. A physician may perform an abortion without obtaining informed consent under this subchapter in a medical emergency. A physician who performs an abortion in a medical emergency shall:

    (1) include in the patient’s medical records a statement signed by the physician certifying the nature of the medical emergency; and

    (2) not later than the 30th day after the date the abortion is performed, certify to the department the specific medical condition that constituted the emergency.

    You do know that medical errors happens, right? People die from them all the time. This seems like a pretty clear-cut case of it.

    • @[email protected]English
      6•25 days ago

      What happens if they thought it was an emergency but other physicians might not agree, or after the fact when more information is available it turns out not to be?

      So what happens is you wait and wait until your patient is going to die without a doubt… because you have to be sure, thus putting their life at risk.

      Emergencies are often not so easy to characterize in the real world. Sometimes you have to make assumptions. Those assumptions aren’t always correct.

      • @[email protected]
        1•25 days ago

        Or you could save your patient’s life. The laws state if the physician believes there’s a medical emergency.

        • @[email protected]English
          4•25 days ago

          I don’t think that’s what it says. Why include the medical records in the statement if we are meant to rely on the doctor’s belief at the time based on the information that was available? Shouldn’t it be enough to trust the expert? It rather looks like making sure there’s documentation for possible criminal prosecution (for murder!) if they’re wrong.

          Sure, I can accept there’s a theory of exceptions, but I think it’s liable to scare away providers. However, I suppose I’m not a medical expert. I can point to the well lack of care situation as my example of this concern and the chilling effect the law has on providers doing their jobs.

          • @[email protected]
            1•25 days ago

            I’m not a medical expert either, but I rely very heavily on physicians to remain alive. You and I both have a vested interest in our doctors treating us well. This looks like a tragic case of a medical error. This was, in 2018, the leading cause of death in America. It’s not a huge stretch of the imagination. Even given the requirement to document it, with over a dozen people saying it would have been correct, it seems like it would be a very simple matter to prove in before a judge that it was necessary. The law also seems more geared towards collecting anonymous statistics as well.