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.
Disgusting that a life was lost over a “person” that would have never existed. This is doing wonders for the birthrate they are so worried about. I wonder if they just assumed this only effects the poors cause wealthier people would go to less restricted hospitals.
I don’t know why but “person” in quotations just rubs me the wrong way. I don’t think we have to dismiss the value of an unborn life in order to support abortion - they’re not mutually exclusive. In this case I would argue that there were two tragedies, one committed by “God” and the other by the state of Texas.