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]
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    425 days ago

    Do you think you should need to get permission to disconnect from the kidney machine? Or do you think that it’s your choice to share your body or not?

    I know why you keep avoiding this question: it shows that you think your bodily autonomy is more important than a woman’s.

    You can try to reframe the issue, but the facts are clear.

    • @[email protected]
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      125 days ago

      It’s a good thing we have dialysis machines so this entire argument is moot, along with organ donations. If the entire premise of the argument is nonsensical, then so would any response to it. Millions of people dying every year is a thing that really happens. I take it you won’t deny they’re people, but somehow it’s okay to kill them?

      Also. “reactionary” was a title used by people like Mao Zedong to justify persecuting and killing innocent people, so that’s a little clue about how you really feel on the topic of murder.