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 don’t understand how a miscarriage counts as abortion. The baby literally died in the womb. This law is sickening. My sister-in-law had a miscarriage last year and it’s scary to think that she could lose her life by trying to become a mother. The crazy part is her religion essentially tells women they aren’t fulfilling their duty to God if they don’t become a mother. (Mormon)
For them, abortion is extinguishing a life. In this case, the fetus, although no longer viable due to mechanical impossibility BUT still connected to the umbilical cord and inside the placenta, gave it a heartbeat. Any human intervention that would cause that heartbeat to go away, such as inducing labor, manual or physical extraction, or even manual dilation of the cervix, since the fetus being way too young to survive outside of the mother, would end up being the cause of that heartbeat going away, and thus, murder, in their eyes. All they “can” do is “Let nature run its course”
It is beyond stupid, cruel and horrible. Those laws are actively killing people through neglect.
Edit: Miscarriage does not mean the fetus “died”, it merely means failure to carry to term or to point where the fetus can survive outside of the mother, which is usually flagged at 20 weeks. When labour started, at an unsustainable pregnancy length, it is counted as a miscarriage because the fetus can’t survive on it’s own, however it was not a spontaneous abortion because there was still a heartbeat.
