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 […]
All of us should be horrified when legislators practice medicine without a license. This should be true no matter if you agree with the law maker or not. There is a reason that physicians undergo through training over many years. The inserting of a misinformed law maker’s opinion into the sacred doctor/patient relationship is abhorrent. Everyone should be able to control their own healthcare decisions. The continued manifestation of this on-going hubris is the conceit of power.
The doctors should be condemned as well. They violated their oath and in so doing put themselves on the same moral level as doctors who cooperated with Nazis in Hitler’s Germany.