It took three ER visits and 20 hours before a hospital admitted Nevaeh Crain, 18, as her condition worsened. Doctors insisted on two ultrasounds to confirm “fetal demise.” She’s one of at least two Texas women who died under the state’s abortion ban.

Candace Fails screamed for someone in the Texas hospital to help her pregnant daughter. “Do something,” she pleaded, on the morning of Oct. 29, 2023.

Nevaeh Crain was crying in pain, too weak to walk, blood staining her thighs. Feverish and vomiting the day of her baby shower, the 18-year-old had gone to two different emergency rooms within 12 hours, returning home each time worse than before.

The first hospital diagnosed her with strep throat without investigating her sharp abdominal cramps. At the second, she screened positive for sepsis, a life-threatening and fast-moving reaction to an infection, medical records show. But doctors said her six-month fetus had a heartbeat and that Crain was fine to leave.

Now on Crain’s third hospital visit, an obstetrician insisted on two ultrasounds to “confirm fetal demise,” a nurse wrote, before moving her to intensive care.

By then, more than two hours after her arrival, Crain’s blood pressure had plummeted and a nurse had noted that her lips were “blue and dusky.” Her organs began failing.

Hours later, she was dead.

Fails, who would have seen her daughter turn 20 this Friday, still cannot understand why Crain’s emergency was not treated like an emergency.

But that is what many pregnant women are now facing in states with strict abortion bans, doctors and lawyers have told ProPublica.

  • @[email protected]
    111•20 days ago

    The second ER diagnosed her with sepsis and then sent her home

    That right there should be criminal charges. Pregnancy staus is irrelevant at that point. Sepsis will kill you if untreated.

    • @[email protected]
      33•20 days ago

      It was the politicians in Texas that harmed this woman. Not the hospital. The Texas AG sent letters to every hospital in Texas saying he would press criminal charges to anyone granting an emergency abortion. As hard as it is for poor and middle class workers, there’s no way any nurse doctor or hospital is going to put themselves in front of the Texas government. If they could they would have left the state already. (many have.) Small towns in forced birth States literally have no pregnancy care facilities because the staff has all left.

      • Pandantic [they/them]English
        13•20 days ago

        But they “saved” the “baby” right?

        Fify - the baby didn’t make it.

        …they said it may have been possible to save both the teenager and her fetus if she had been admitted earlier for close monitoring and continuous treatment.

        There was a chance Crain could have remained pregnant, they said. If she had needed an early delivery, the hospital was well-equipped to care for a baby on the edge of viability.