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.
I see stories like this a lot and can’t believe it. My wife was in a similar situation and had to get an emergency dnc, and still came close to dying from sepsis.
The doctors were so on it, we waited in the ER for a while because they were packed but as soon as they took her blood and realized what was going on she was in surgery within the hour.
Our son want even 2 at the time. If we were 30 minutes west she would’ve died. It’s absolutely fucking wild.
How could anyone think this is right?