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.
It’s absolutely unconscionable, but it’s a medical (and very stupid/unnecessary) version of the trolley problem.
You’re a doctor. The tracks going one way have a single patient that you can treat and save. The tracks going the other way have every patient you’d get to see over the entirety of the rest of your career - literally thousands of people.
Treat the one and risk an avalanche of legal problems to include losing your license; the literal thousands of people are now fucked. Skip the one under the legal microscope, and she’s for-sure fucked, but your license lives to serve another day.
It’s fucked up. It’s evil. It’s what pro-life gets us.
You cannot expect a doctor to risk their freedom over a single patient. It’s like societal-level triage.
You can expect your lawmakers to not craft the world you live in into a dystopian hellscape… when they fail to live up to that expectation, don’t direct your anger at the people they’ve put into a bind; bring it directly to the lawmakers.