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.
Texas state law allows abortion in cases of medical emergencies. The hospital was absolutely in the wrong here.
The hospital knew that they had to protect themselves against the jagoffs who prosecute people who provide women with healthcare.
The law is what created this situation; if the doctors and hospital administration didn’t have to worry about the fascists in the State government, this never would have been an issue.
Or do you just think the doctors didn’t perform the procedure because they didn’t feel like it?
The law is perfectly clear in allowing this. I’m not going to guess why they didn’t do it, but your point is like arguing a cop watching a mass shooting happen right in front of him would be right to blame the law against excessive use of force if he chose not to kill the mass shooter even though there was an explicit clause saying it would have been permitted.
We all know why they didn’t do it, and your willful ignorance is telling.
Alright, since you want me to say what it was, it sounds like a medical error to me.
Making an argument comparing doctors to cops may not have been the best move.
I’m not comparing them in terms of moral status, I’m comparing them in terms of what they can and can’t do by law.
Read your own link.
So, the words say that they can help, but because they (very intentionally) made the definitions of ‘life threatening condition’ and ‘Substantial impairment of a major bodily function’ undefined, there is no legal way for a doctor to bring harm to a fetus with a heartbeat without exposing themselves to the draconian Texas penalty laws https://guides.sll.texas.gov/abortion-laws/civil-penalties
The physician believed that a medical emergency had taken place, and therefore it would have been legal. And would you rather face legal consequences, or watch someone die in front of you because you could help them but didn’t?
I hope all that doctor’s other patients feel as morally superior as you do.
I hope the lawyers who gave the doctor this horrible advice get fired.
The woman died of sepsis. It’s extremely likely when you have a dead or dying fetus hemorrhagically working its way out of a uterus, but until you have it, you don’t. By the time people realize what’s going on, it’s often too late.
The law is disgusting because it is medically uninformed and constraining, and it assumes anyone considering abortion is just some gleefully slutty baby murderer.
From the article:
This would mean it was legal to perform an abortion. They should have known about this risk.
I am trying to work on being less confrontational on here, but it really feels like you are being willfully obtuse. Playing devil’s advocate for you, it seems like you are struggling with the gap between the text of the law and the enforcement context of the law. In this case there is a very wide gap between the two.
You aren’t going to change any minds here by arguing that the law technically allows abortions in this case. The issue is the enforcement and underlying context of the law.
I think the text of the law is quite plain. It’s not a huge reach to imagine that this is yet another terrible instance of a medial error. Hundreds of thousands of people die every year because of them. If you want to talk about enforcement, then we have at least one case of a doctor having a lawsuit against him dismissed after he was accused of providing an abortion. Also, as of 2023, nobody had been arrested for providing an abortion.
I appreciate you trying to see things from my perspective, but the facts of the case seem pretty clear to me. Arguing that this is because of the abortion law doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. If the law says “you can shoot someone if they invade your home,” much the same as this law does, it’s not the legislators’ fault if I freeze up when my home is invaded and die. Medical error, either because of bad legal advice or a poor understanding of medicine, is more reasonable as an explanation.
Yes they should have but didn’t because of a vague law that does not lay out exactly when the mothers life is in danger. Does she have to be in pain? Conscious? Bleeding? Irregular heartbeat? Does the fetus have to viable? The law does not allow for interpretation so hospitals literally have to wait until the women is in cardiac arrest to act. So yes if this women was in any normal state with normal defined laws that don’t restrict how doctors decide what their patients need. So yes they should have acted but couldn’t.
The 2017 law allowed abortions in emergencies as defined in Section 171.002, Health and Safety Code. This is what it says:
“As certified by a physician” means the physician can decide whether this is a life-threatening emergency.
https://www.reuters.com/legal/texas-judge-allows-woman-get-emergency-abortion-despite-state-ban-2023-12-07/
Hmmmmm it’s like the religious right nut jobs don’t trust science and doctors.
Please see my reply to your other comment. I don’t see how this has anything to do with science and doctors rather than some idiot giving fatally bad legal advice.
Did you read the article?
I did. Here’s how I replied:
Elaborating further, though the odds of the baby surviving past the first year are only 5-10%, its life should still be preserved if possible. People can and do elect to have surgery despite a low chance of survival.
The problem is that legal jargon and medical jargon are very different animals. The legal is deliberately ambiguous, and the medical is hyper-specific… so doctors are left scratching their heads about things like “is the white blood cell count high enough for a lawyer to call this life threatening?” “Is the blood pressure low enough?” meanwhile the mother waits and dies.
“During a medical emergency” or “life threatening” are copouts that don’t actually mean shit, and no doctor is going to risk going to prison to find out.
There’s already been at least one doctor in Texas who risked legal consequences for performing an abortion, and he won out. And given that twelve other physicians stated a premature delivery should have been done, it’s plain that something should have been done. Now she’s dead, because apparently the hospital staff misunderstood a rather clearly-written law.
Any doctor that performs an abortion in Texas is risking a minimum $100,000 fine and permanently losing there license to practice medicine if lawyers, who are not medical professionals, decide it was medically necessary yet.
As a result, doctors in TX have been advised by their lawyers not to perform abortions unless the mother is literally minutes away from death, because otherwise you can’t prove that it was medically necessary.
In the case, the patient died of sepsis. Doctors couldn’t perform the abortion when she needed it because they couldn’t prove that it was medically necessary yet.
They knew that not performing the abortion would put mom at a much high risk of dying later. But they couldn’t legally prove that risk exists because all pregnancies involve some degree of risk.
If you want doctors to perform medical procedures when it’s medically necessary, you need doctors making that decision, not lawyers, not the state. That’s what Texas had before this law went into effect.
It’s literally created a trolly problem, it’s now better for the doctors to let some women die so they can save more lives later.
But we have “over a dozen” medical experts who say it would have been the correct decision, and the law explicitly allows it. If it’s so obvious that over a dozen experts who never spoke to the patient could know it was the right decision, then how does a competent doctor actually interacting with the patient not know that?
Yes.
That’s the problem with this law.
It takes the decision away from the medical experts, and puts in the hands of lawyers and judges who may or may not have a different agenda.
The lawyers/judges would want to throw physicians in prison? And as of 2023, no doctors had actually been arrested for doing this. Actually, at least one got a case dismissed after the fact.
I can see you’re clearly not interested in understanding the situation the physician was in or discussing solutions that would have saved this patient’s life.
I’m not going to debate you further.
The article says what would have saved her life, so I didn’t think that was at issue here. But alright. It was good talking to you, and I hope you have a good day.
Sure sure. Perfectly legal to do an abortion in Texas in a case of a medical emergency.
And then the case gets reviewed by a board of religious zealots who believe unwanted pregnancies (and by extension, pregnancy related deaths) are part of their god’s divine plan. They determine if this was an abortion, or a murder. In Texas, a state where the only thing liberal is their application of the death penalty.
Can you see why what the law says and what the law does can be very different?
The definition of emergency is absurdly specific though. The corpse inside you can’t just be dead, it can’t just be decomposing, the fragments of putrefying corpse matter must be coursing through your blood at a sufficient concentration before anything can legally be done.
So, therein lies the problem.
They couldn’t take action before her life was in danger even though they knew it would be. So they have to wait until it’s an “emergency” which is far more risky. And this woman died was a result.
This law greatly increased the risk of the situation needlessly.
She died, so that’s an emergency. If someone is having a stroke and somehow doesn’t die until three days later, that doesn’t make it any less an emergency.
Do you hear yourself?
It was an emergency because she died?
She died days after it was too late for an abortion to save her.
If they performed the abortion when it would have saved her life, she wouldn’t have died, by your own logic it would’n’ve been an emergency.
And you’d be here arguing that the doctor should lose his license for performing an abortion when it wasn’t an emergency.
Yes. If someone is going to die soon after the problem is discovered, it’s an emergency. I don’t think this is a controversial claim. If someone gets hit by a car or has a stroke and has days to live, that doesn’t mean we hold off on providing healthcare so they survive the incident.
Notice how that law is vague on the medical emergency aspects. When exactly is a women with an nonviable pregnancy a danger to the mother?
“Life-threatening condition” is a fairly wide umbrella. Given the number of people who die of sepsis every year, that sounds like a life-threatening condition to me. A substantial impairment is defined under federal law. Sepsis would likely also count there, too - it messes you up real badly, after all.
https://www.reuters.com/legal/texas-judge-allows-woman-get-emergency-abortion-despite-state-ban-2023-12-07/
That threat was because she could have sought a C-section. If I’m understanding this page correctly, one’s fertility is reduced by about 13% after a C-section. If I’m not, feel free to show me how I got it wrong. Did that guy ever end up prosecuting anyone involved, though? Why would a judge side with the prosecution after a court literally gave her an order permitting her to do that?