Abortion is shaping up to be one of the top issues driving voters to the polls this election season and along with pro and con positions comes stories like these: A young Texas woman died following a long and painful miscarriage because doctors felt they couldn't legally perform the intervention she needed to survive.
A ProPublica report says that Josseli Barnica, a 28 year-old mother of one, went to the hospital pregnant with her second child after developing complications at 17 weeks.
The fetus with no chance of survival was on its way out naturally. Doctors noted the Houston woman was having a miscarriage 'in process.'
Under normal circumstances, experts say doctors would've sped up the miscarriage with drugs and scraped her uterus clean to prevent infection.
But the fetus had a heartbeat and a Texas law passed in 2021 forbids abortion past the six-week mark when the embryo has a heartbeat.
Doctors felt they could do nothing for her, so she suffered for days. Forty hours after the miscarriage began, she finally delivered the fetus and later died from an infection that had entered her uterus during the protracted miscarriage.
Daily Mail noted that "Roe v Wade was yet to be overturned at the time of Barnica's death, however Texas had enacted strict civil penalties for doctors performing abortions after six weeks by allowing the public to sue them for $10,000 judgements."
ProPublica said the doctors involved in Barnica’s care at HCA Houston Healthcare Northwest did not respond to multiple requests for comment. In a statement, HCA Healthcare said “our responsibility is to be in compliance with applicable state and federal laws and regulations” and said that physicians exercise their independent judgment.
“If this was Massachusetts or Ohio, she would have had that delivery within a couple hours,” Dr. Susan Mann, a national patient safety expert in obstetric care who teaches at Harvard University, told Pro Publica.