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.

  • frunch@lemmy.world
    13·
    2 months ago

    This is how it works though, right? They keep ostracizing groups until they run out of out-groups to attack and the next round begins. The old inner circle is now the circle and a new inner circle is proclaimed, the new outgroup(s) are revealed, and the feeding frenzy continues.

    This is what always baffles me about minorities that are staunchly Republican. They’re actually voting for themselves to be put on the chopping block (just not right away)

    • Billiam@lemmy.world
      14·
      2 months ago

      This is exactly why fascism is ultimately self-defeating. The only question is how many people get hurt in the meantime.