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.

    • Tedesche@lemmy.world
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      21 days ago

      Don’t blame America for this. Most of us want legal, safe abortion laws. It’s a disgruntled minority of hyper-religious whack jobs that have been handed outrageous power in our top court by a narcissistic sociopath that are to blame.

      Evangelicals Christians = American Taliban.

      • unemployedclaquer
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        21 days ago

        yeh agreed! but might be a bit complicated. possibly the dumbest thing i’ve ever written down is that I’m into some cool bands,