A Texas Woman Died After Waiting 40 Hours for Miscarriage Care
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.
there's another thread about outsiders' criticisms of lemmy, and one of the comments mentioned that it's "unwelcoming to right wing viewpoints"
I WONDER FUCKING WHY
let's keep it that way, the right-wing should be unwelcome everywhere
1000%. So long as right-wing equates to racist, seditious, traitorous bastards, then yeah...you're not welcome here or anywhere else in this country. Go find Jesus or something.
yeah, definitions are hard, but in general I tend to think of the right as promoting traditional hierarchy and the left as being egalitarian.
Any amount of right wing will never sit well with me after trump. Things could flip and the conservatives could somehow be fighting for workers rights and I'd still side with the party that supports women's right to chose etc.
If lemmy became a right wing cess pool I'd be done with it in a heart beat. There are a lot of shit ideas on this platform and I do wish I could find my tribe but as much as I know of them, they are my people.
What country?
Most right wingers think their views are legitimate because the right wing exists as the direct opposition to the left. But i think that view is warped.
We need to start considering right wingers as extremists and not the opposition. They should be outliers on a spectrum where the left is much more central and the right is much more to the extreme right
|----------------------------------------left wing----‐-----center----------------------------------------right wing--------|
Like that
They think their views are as right as ours are left. If they were, they would likely be welcome here.
I don't really see what is wrong with authentically egalitarian politics, so I'm inclined to think the "center" is just a euphemism for right-wing.
If a left wing movement fails in its egalitarianism, like when the USSR had slave camps, then I think we should not think of that movement as left wing at all, it just fails the definition of being left wing.
The common response to this is that it is a form of no true scotsman fallacy, which I think could be a legitimate concern since you might define a left wing ideal as the definition and anything failing to live up to the perfection of that ideal is not "left". But on the other hand, I don't know how else to consider some politics authentically egalitarian and worth supporting and others inauthentic or corrupt and embodying hierarchical or right-wing tendencies. Maybe there is no bright line we can draw or reduce to a logical equation, but I would like to think there is still some value in evaluating which politics to support (i.e. which politics are furthering egalitarian means or ends).
Or, hear me out, discard the left-right metaphor for the nonsense that it is and refer to ideologies by their names. There is no left, there are communists/socialists and anarchists. There is no center, there are liberals and conservatives. There is no right, there are fascists and "libertarians."
The left-right metaphor is a set of training wheels, and by continuing to use them you sabotage your own political understanding.
I think it's important to clarify what is left or right because that's how people talk and think - a lot of political language is warped or difficult to clarify. When I explain what liberals are to people in the U.S. they simply refuse to believe me. They think "liberal" can only mean "the left" and this has a whole set of assumptions built into it. When I ask them about the Liberal party in Australia they legitimately don't understand it, and it seems like people are extremely stubborn around political topics and unwilling to believe you when you say something so against their understanding.
I think whether a "communist" or "socialist" is left-wing depends on a few things, I don't consider Marxist-Leninism a left-wing movement or ideology for example.
I also tend to be skeptical that ideology is relevant to political movements, and that most of the time politics is reduced to the struggle of different constituents who pragmatically use ideology to manipulate people into supporting that constituency. Much like racism was leveraged to get the agrarian, southern whites in the U.S. to vote for the interests of wealthy landowners in that region, I think ideological promises or affiliations are often used to whip up support and then dropped once elected in favor of whatever is needed to get things done.
Sometimes I think ideology applies, it's hard to understand the particular flavor of George W. Bush's imperialism without understanding the Christian motivation to wage a religious war, but even that is ultimately more about civilizational struggle" than it is about any particular religious or theological belief.
Anyway, I just mean to say that most political language sabotages political understanding, and that maybe understanding is a tricky endeavor.
I think most conservatives are just unintelligent so they're ripe for fox news to tell them what to think. Yes, there was a study that showed conservatives are less intelligent than leftists
Reality has a left-wing bias
Ok I'm a lefty but I've always hated this statement. It is the launching point of a great deal of ignorance and idiocy, kind of like some religious dogma.
But... It's observable fact...
A typical position held by people who call themselves "left" is a desire to completely ban gun ownership on the grounds that gun ownership leads to gun violence.
Gun violence was much lower when you could buy actual machine guns right off the shelf, and mass shootings were virtually unheard of. What happened since then, and how would banning guns fix it?
This is just one of many blind spots that make the statement unrealistic.
Except if you go far enough left, you get your guns back...
I mean I'm down as long as we're not talking going full tankie
I think it's more shorthand for the fact people generally do want to take care of each other and make sure everyone has the opportunity for a happy life.
Though I suppose it is a little cheeky to say that means people are left leaning.
Plenty of church-going pro-lifers feel like they're doing the best for their communities and people in general. It's why when we make arguments we need to not talk down to people like they're idiots, because they generally are not.
If I was on the receiving end of a line that far up it's own ass I'd stop listening immediately.
I said it a bit in jest, though as explained, I think it's still somewhat a true statement. I wouldn't actually say this to people who don't identify as left-leaning, because as you point out, it would be counter-productive.
I wish the world was unwelcoming to right-wing viewpoints. This is the result and so many people are fine with it. It’s so depressing.
Unfortunately you'll have to get used to it and continue challenging them. The polycrisis is only going to get worse and the number of refugees from the impact of climate change and climate change related causes i.e. conflict from collapsing food / water access and / or failed states.
In the next 10 to 20 years life quality will peak and then will start collapsing over the next 50.
When that happens a significant cohort of the population will close ranks and want to "protect" those closest around them, the desire the ultra-rich have for isolation will continue to trickle down into the rich and remnants of the upper middle class as the wealth gap widens. In times of crisis this cohort pushes further and further right.
So keep working against these forces so we can get the rich to pay their fair share to fix these problems but be prepared to take up arms when the house of cards that is the relative stability we have now collapses.
Any space thats welcoming for me (a trans person) is unwelcoming to right wing viewpoints.
> Talks against healthcare
> Wonders why nobody likes those speeches
Paradox of tolerance. They aren’t welcome because they tend not to play nice with others.
I feel genuinely bad for the non-facist conservatives, but today they’d be called leftist too, so I think it’s still fair to say it really shouldn’t be welcome anywhere because the term has become very extreme.
"non-fascist conservatives" have spent the last 40 years obstructing and cozying up to fascists rather than play well with others. They knew what they were doing.
Or, to be as charitable as possible, they're useful idiots who are lazily unaware of how heinous the people they're blindly following are.
They're not exactly unaware, but only care for how it affects them. Anything heinous that happens to someone else is seen as completely irrelevant.
This is how it works though, right? They keep ostracizing groups until they run out of out-groups to attack and the next round begins. The old inner circle is now the circle and a new inner circle is proclaimed, the new outgroup(s) are revealed, and the feeding frenzy continues.
This is what always baffles me about minorities that are staunchly Republican. They're actually voting for themselves to be put on the chopping block (just not right away)
This is exactly why fascism is ultimately self-defeating. The only question is how many people get hurt in the meantime.
They can stay on X.
This is fucking barbaric. The hospital let her sit for 40 hours with a fetus hanging out of her uterus. Just take a moment to imagine what that alone must have felt like aside from the emotional horror of losing a pregnancy. We wouldn't even imagine treating pets or livestock this way but it's clear that these repugnant forced-birthers don't consider women to be people. One little pill to speed up the labor that her body already decided was needed was all that was required to keep this woman alive. What's the point of even having healthcare when we can't rely on it.
God. I agree. This is horrific. And we have the audacity to consider ourselves a first-world country. Texans should immediately take themselves to the state house to demand better. Our tax dollars pay for hospitals to treat us, not to kill us.
Not a lawyer, but I wonder if there a case to be made with letting a woman get an infection and die due to the fear of commiting a crime by killing the baby. In the end, two people died, but one could have survived.
Oh you can rely on it... Only if you are Male, White, and Wealthy.
A texas woman didn't die, a texas woman was murdered by the state's ignorant, bigoted, christo-fascist policy - abbott, patrick, cruz, gohmert, that cock eyed AG and the rest of them along with every complicit texas republican voter... they all have blood on their cowardly hands.
Ok, and? What consequences are they going to face? How will their quality of life be diminished in any way?
I'll answer for you: none, because we, the little people, do not matter. Period.
I want change by any means necessary.
I have been sharpening my guillotine ... It could fix some things
I’ll bring the Murphy’s wood oil and get that frame polished up real nice
Only the best for these demons!!
Gotta keep those grooves clean so the blade doesn’t bind on the way down
These are the practical guillotine tips that I live for!
Comments like these do less than nothing. We need to actually go outside and organize against the people taking our freedoms away. Protests, signing petitions, civil disobedience, even just donating goes a hell of a lot farther than writing comments on the internet.
Oh completely agree... I'm also just having a laugh
Here's hoping Allred wiped the stage with cruz enough to show a little hope to anyone with any good in them left in the state.
And if she didn't get murdered, she could have been charged for murder for having a miscarriage.
Pure fucking rage. Not advocating for violance but, I would vote not guilty.
Somewhat ironic username considering that’s exactly what every conservative is, smile and vote to fuck your buddy over. I’d be another on the not guilty
And Republicans will never care about it. Fucking ghouls.
There’s always an acceptable number of deaths with the GOP. It’s just happens to be infinite when it comes to healthcare, pandemics, poverty, guns - basically anything that won’t result in punishing innocent brown people. In that case the number is extremely low.
Not only will they not care, they will dismiss it and joke about it. From the article (regarding a different woman who died from being denied life saving medical care):
My country's aptitude for remaining entirely unmoved by preventable tragedies that utterly upend political trajectories in other nations has become one of our most globally defining traits.
And that's the difference between a sane country and America. We don't even blink when children are murdered in schools- we sure as shit aren't going to do anything about dead women.
Supreme Court scandal
Gun violence
Police brutality
Politicized natural disaster relief
Food insecurity
Homelessness
Drug epidemic
Pregnancy mortality
And, last but not least:
Fascist attempted coup
America: 🤷♂️
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.
Its the downside of being a melting-pot: too many different worldviews. The Australians could get together and ban guns, the Irish could fight for women's rights. Here, if one side of the country tries to enact change the other side will fight tooth and nail to stop it.
Disgusting that a life was lost over a "person" that would have never existed. This is doing wonders for the birthrate they are so worried about. I wonder if they just assumed this only effects the poors cause wealthier people would go to less restricted hospitals.
I don't know why but "person" in quotations just rubs me the wrong way. I don't think we have to dismiss the value of an unborn life in order to support abortion - they're not mutually exclusive. In this case I would argue that there were two tragedies, one committed by "God" and the other by the state of Texas.
The fetus was nonviable, it might be tragic but it was not and could never have been a person.
That's why I put the quotes. Some people may call it a person. I don't. That was me trying to respect the other side.
I think I'm just sensitive because I'm pro-choice but constantly get painted as heartless and uncaring by my pro-life family. Viable or not, I feel something for these unborn things, just like my family - the only difference is that I don't prioritize my feelings over the rights of other people, nor do I shy away from the fact that abortions can be necessary and merciful. I am an ally in this fight, but if you're dismissing the miracle of life as nothing more than a medical condition, you're not helping the cause - to some extent you're a liability to those of us trying to actually win people over.
Vote Kamala Harris and your sisters, wives and daughters might stop dying for lack of health care when pregnant. Allow Trump to regain power and it will get much, much worse for the women you care about.
What is the course of action that you expect Kamala to take that would prevent this situation in Texas? And if you have one, why hasn't Biden done it already?
Win the WH, win both houses of Congress, blow up the filibuster and enact national protections for abortion.
Will it work? Probably not. It definitely won't happen if Trump wins, though.
Plus if Trump wins, Alito and Thomas retire and get replaced by 25 year old fascists and things get even worse for decades.
I dunno if you were being sincere or intentionally obtuse, but it's kind of straightforward that we have to win.
I am not American, nor the person you responded to, but in 2020 the Democrats won the white house, the Senate, and the House of Representatives.
As an outsider looking in, why is there the expectation that Kamala doing it again in 2024 will have a different result?
Unfortunately the Democrats need slightly more than a bare majority because some Democrats might as well be Republicans.
Kamala has also stated her support for exempting this legislation from the filibuster, something Biden didn't do. She wouldn't technically have the power herself, but might get Senate Democrats on board.
Back in 2020, I read op-eds from several pundits who worried that choosing Biden was a mistake, as he ran on a platform essentially of returning politics to "normal." They worried that once he won, people would settle back into the old routines, and forget about the simmering fascist threat and do diddly about it. I remember this well, because I feared the same.
That's pretty much what happened. Credit to the House January 6th special committee for finally forcing Merrick Garland to get off his ass and do a something about the insurrection... 2 years later. (Which made it easy to delay the trial until after the next election.) That's about it, though. Hell, this wasn't difficult to predict, given the way that Obama decided to "look forward" and not hold Bush administration officials accountable for their crimes.
That is to say, if Harris wins, I predict more of the same. Folks on the blue side will breathe a sigh of relief, make excuses for why they can't act, and do their best to forget about it until the next most-important-election-in-history. We (Americans) don't have a plan to deal with it, and they'll instead just get angry and call you and me disingenuous, or Russian bots, for pointing it out.
That shit hasn't happened in less contentious times, I literally cannot imagine it happening now.
Ok probably not sincere.
The contentiousness is what put killing the filibuster on the table. In less contentious times, we didn't need to destroy basic political norms just to save people's lives.
It takes basically no effort to vote. Things are clearly better with Harris winning than Trump.
You think I'm not sincere, and I think you're delusional.
You arent sincere. You dont bring any arguments to the table while all the people you are arguing with did. Why do you think Trump would make this situation better when he is the reason this issue exists?
Roe v Wade still existed in less contentious times.
Not actively, gleefully making things worse. Biden is doing this.
Working to stack the Supreme Court, and triggering a constitutional crisis in the process because the Republican Senate will refuse confirmation, and the Supreme Court that was stacked with self-contradictory GOP bullshit will agree with them would be the interesting move that won't happen because the Democrats are cowards and institutionalists rather than fascist monsters.
What definitely will happen with Kamala is that women in New York or California don't suffer the same fate next year as well.
This avoidable and preventable death brought to you by "pro life" partisans.
Anti-choice is gaining more traction and is more accurate. Anti-choice or pro-death is more appropriate and logically consistent
All life is sacred, except when its not
Well off Republican Christian lives that can afford to go out of state for their moral abortion is sacred to them
Republicans: “God’s will.”
As long as there was no abortion, their view is she deserves it.
Its funny how religious people love invoking their holy books to justify hatred and violence while ignoring the parts explicitly saying to not judge others and that human life is more valuable then any commandment from god (also the torah/old testament allows abortion in many cases). Its almost as if those "religious people" don't care about religion and just want an excuse to hate.
Fuck your God.
Well, actually there is no god, or gods, but you know, fuck your idea of what a God would be like
Pro lifers kill again. They rate the right to live of potential life higher than someone who has been here for 28 years. Someone who left a husband and a child behind. I have to accept I hate pro lifers for the harm they cause. There is no justice in this world as long as these inhuman and barbaric laws are killing people. Real people, not potential people.
The hospital should be sued for death from negligence
The hospital's hands are tied by dystopian laws - this is what "pro life" looks like.
These are becoming way more common the more we let this right wing evil shit sink in.
I’m sorry but humans refusing to save the life of another human because of an obtuse law is unconscionable. They should have done what needed to be done and let the lawyers sort it out later.
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.
By who, the state of Texas? This is what they want to happen.
The hospital was following Texas law. Any doctor who helped her would have been arrested.
"I swear to fulfill, to the best of my ability and judgment, this covenant: I will respect the hard-won scientific gains of those physicians in whose steps I walk, and gladly share such knowledge as is mine with those who are to follow. I will apply, for the benefit of the sick, all measures [that] are required, avoiding those twin traps of overtreatment and therapeutic nihilism. I will remember that there is art to medicine as well as science, and that warmth, sympathy, and understanding may outweigh the surgeon's knife or the chemist's drug. I will not be ashamed to say "I know not," nor will I fail to call in my colleagues when the skills of another are needed for a patient's recovery. I will respect the privacy of my patients, for their problems are not disclosed to me that the world may know. Most especially must I tread with care in matters of life and death. If it is given me to save a life, all thanks. But it may also be within my power to take a life; this awesome responsibility must be faced with great humbleness and awareness of my own frailty. Above all, I must not play at God. I will remember that I do not treat a fever chart, a cancerous growth, but a sick human being, whose illness may affect the person's family and economic stability. My responsibility includes these related problems, if I am to care adequately for the sick. I will prevent disease whenever I can, for prevention is preferable to cure. I will remember that I remain a member of society, with special obligations to all my fellow human beings, those sound of mind and body as well as the infirm. If I do not violate this oath, may I enjoy life and art, respected while I live and remembered with affection thereafter. May I always act so as to preserve the finest traditions of my calling and may I long experience the joy of healing those who seek my help."
Instead of blaming doctors for not martyring themselves for the Hippocratic oath, we should be putting the blame on the lawmakers that created this scenario to begin with.
Greg Abbott and Donald Trump should be sued for maliciously causing death.
Leaving Children without a Mother while also killing the Fetus is called being PRO LIFE and PROTECTING THE CHILDREN!
What the actual fuck. This is horrendous.
Pro-life crowd, I thought you were supposed to keep life, not end it.
Now there's a man who's a widow, a child without a mother, and a lady who died all for literally nothing.
Fuckin' hell.
Hurting women is part of the platform. This is not even an 'unintended' consequence.
It's 2024. What the fuck america
Don’t blame America for this. Most of us want legal, safe abortion laws. It’s a disgruntled minority of hyper-religious whack jobs that have been handed outrageous power in our top court by a narcissistic sociopath that are to blame.
Evangelicals Christians = American Taliban.
yeh agreed! but might be a bit complicated. possibly the dumbest thing i've ever written down is that I'm into some cool bands,
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?
People who hate women do. Conservatives hate women and enjoying their suffering and pain is absolutely part of their motivation.
It is too generous the benefit of the doubt to just say they are ambivalent about women suffering from this. Having the power to hurt other people is all they care and want
Both sides are the same. It can't be any worse with the Republicans in office, so just don't vote. That'll show 'em. /s
This is worse than 'Thoughts and Prayers'.
A lot of elected officials - and their supporters - are accessories to the killing .
This is more like armed police waiting around outside a crime scene and actively preventing any attemp . . .
Everything is bigger in Texas...
Texas politicians and anti-abortion death cultists murdered this poor woman.
Someone should go to prison for life over this. Jesus Christmas.
If you can't see how wrong this is, you are a broken person.
a lot of people should. this is a concerted and deliberate effort. it should start with 6 justices.
However it will start with the doctors. The lowest hanging fruit.
That's bad.
Republican ideas made into law killed her.
Conservatives get off on women dying like this
Lol got 'er. Now we don't need to pay her social security
This headline pissed me off before I realized it was abortion-ban related. Now I’m fucking livid.
Pro-lifers doing a fantastic job of killing people. Truly horrific.
we can't tolerate this. these supposed "pro-life" policies are killing, literally murdering women.
Picture this when ever you see that Orange Turd walk on camera. That is what he brings.
Also the smarmy couch-fucker who is riding on his coattails.
Omfg I get it now... "All life is sacred" as in all life must feel the fearful embrace of God.
I was gonna put a "/s" at the end, but I'm honestly not too sure anymore... Seems like that's exactly what they want. Like what's the point if not the cruelty?
In 2006, when I was about 6 years, my mother, sadly, suffered a miscarriage. It devestated our family. This also marked a turning point in my life as my parents divorced not long after. It's stories like these that make me wonder what would have happened to my dear mother after her miscarriage if the same fundamentalist theocrats were in power then. Would they have arrested her? Would she have died under the same atrocious conditions that Ms. Barnica had to suffer? What will happen to my wife if, goodness forbid, something similar happens to her? This story highlights why, five days from now, you MUST vote. We have make that incidents like these don't repeat. Don't just do it for your sake. Do it for the sake of those dearest and nearest to you.
Not to downplay the situation but this was 2021? Wasn’t all the abortion shenanigans more recent?
Not all of them.
The Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, was later.
But this was just days after Texas SB 8, 87th Regular Session went into effect. Which added two major laws related to abortion: the prohibition of abortion after a fetal heartbeat is detected and the ability to file a civil lawsuit against anyone who provides or facilitates an abortion.
Doctors were warned by their lawyers that if they provided an ‘abortion’ after a fetal heartbeat was detected (the case here) that they would be sued and likely lose their license if they lost.
Texas jumped the gun on these laws:
This situation is so insane that gut punching a pregnant woman could've saved her life. IT IS NOT WHAT I SUGGEST AT ALL. But as medical team didn't kill off the dangerous and doomed unbred for they feared the liability coming from theae weird laws, I guess, that could cross the mind of a father at least once*.
* If he was someone as fucked up as me, I guess.
Just republican shit.
Is the law against a c-section and trying to save both mom and the baby?
A fetus cannot survive at 17 weeks.
Regardless, the State is intimidating doctors into not providing necessary healthcare.
My bad, can't count in weeks. I really meant to pretend to save an unviable baby to save the mother, but I guess that early would be pushing it. Those lawmakers really really suck ass.
“Those damn immigrants taking all our healthcare.”
I can hear the church lady's now, "omg that's awful, how did this happen???????" Oh well, gods plan.
Ctrl-F's for "Merrick Garland"
Pussy ass doctors violating their hippocratic oath. The Texas law may have pit them in a "gray" area legally, bit they killed her because they thought it was less likely to get them in trouble.
Texas state law allows abortion in cases of medical emergencies. The hospital was absolutely in the wrong here.
The hospital knew that they had to protect themselves against the jagoffs who prosecute people who provide women with healthcare.
The law is what created this situation; if the doctors and hospital administration didn't have to worry about the fascists in the State government, this never would have been an issue.
Or do you just think the doctors didn't perform the procedure because they didn't feel like it?
The law is perfectly clear in allowing this. I'm not going to guess why they didn't do it, but your point is like arguing a cop watching a mass shooting happen right in front of him would be right to blame the law against excessive use of force if he chose not to kill the mass shooter even though there was an explicit clause saying it would have been permitted.
We all know why they didn't do it, and your willful ignorance is telling.
thanks for going to the mat with that lunatic, you may have helped distract them from whatever other bullshit they were planning. abortion is health care. denying abortion is denying health care.
You bet!
Exposing the moral depravity of reactionaries is kind of a pet project of mine.
Alright, since you want me to say what it was, it sounds like a medical error to me.
Making an argument comparing doctors to cops may not have been the best move.
I'm not comparing them in terms of moral status, I'm comparing them in terms of what they can and can't do by law.
Hundreds of doctors and their lawyers disagree with you. Of course they could provide medical services, and see if local law enforcement decides to arrest them and lock them up. Or they could withhold medical services, because that's what their lawyers say is a reasonable interpretation of the law.
In other words, it doesn't really matter what you or I think. It matters what doctors and their lawyers believe is likely to occur. And we know what that is, because they're telling us out loud, and they're showing us through their actions.
Of course you're entitled to interpret the law however you want to. I think many of us have done that over time, and sometimes we realize that we got it wrong, because we see that lawyers and courts don't agree with us. Probably this is one of the times that you need to recognize what's actually happening, and realize that your wishful thinking is just that. I'm sure many people would be happier if reality matched your thoughts, but it doesn't.
Can you please tell me how this is confusing:
...
You do know that medical errors happens, right? People die from them all the time. This seems like a pretty clear-cut case of it.
It wasn't a "medical error."
It was the State of Texas intimidating doctors into not performing life-saving healthcare.
You can try to reframe it all you want, but this it the truth of the situation.
How is any of that legal text "intimidating"?
Yeah, they probably were just taking a long lunch instead of treating a patient.
Are you really asking how a law can be intimidating? That's like... The reason we have laws, man.
Laws can also be misread, and it's very likely that this was done somehow. The law explicitly allows abortions under these circumstances. Can you explain yourself what's confusing about it?
There's nothing confusing about it.
The law is set up to intimate doctors into not performing abortions. The doctors believe they will be second-guessed by Ken Paxton and his merry band of fascists.
You want to reframe it and blame the doctors instead of the draconian law that intimidates healthcare professionals.
There should never have been a restriction in the first place; women should be free to make their own healthcare decisions free from the constraints of theocratic virtue-signaling control freaks.
How is allowing abortions during medical emergencies intimidating? That should be reassuring.
To your second point, what about the fetus/baby's bodily autonomy? Surely that should be respected as well if it's likely to survive.
The results speak for themselves if you're not afraid to interrogate what happened.
But surely you're more knowledgeable about the law than the lawyers employed by the hospital.
The fetus is not autonomous, so how the fuck can it have autonomy?
It's confusing because Ken Paxton doesn't actually care about the law. His goons will show up at your door and accuse you of violating the law whether you did the right thing or not.
That's worth watching an innocent person die? Besides, how likely is it that "even though she was literally dying of the infection and the hospital knew it, that didn't constitute a medical emergency" would hold up in court?
Read your own link.
So, the words say that they can help, but because they (very intentionally) made the definitions of 'life threatening condition' and 'Substantial impairment of a major bodily function' undefined, there is no legal way for a doctor to bring harm to a fetus with a heartbeat without exposing themselves to the draconian Texas penalty laws https://guides.sll.texas.gov/abortion-laws/civil-penalties
The physician believed that a medical emergency had taken place, and therefore it would have been legal. And would you rather face legal consequences, or watch someone die in front of you because you could help them but didn't?
The woman died of sepsis. It’s extremely likely when you have a dead or dying fetus hemorrhagically working its way out of a uterus, but until you have it, you don’t. By the time people realize what’s going on, it’s often too late.
The law is disgusting because it is medically uninformed and constraining, and it assumes anyone considering abortion is just some gleefully slutty baby murderer.
From the article:
This would mean it was legal to perform an abortion. They should have known about this risk.
I am trying to work on being less confrontational on here, but it really feels like you are being willfully obtuse. Playing devil's advocate for you, it seems like you are struggling with the gap between the text of the law and the enforcement context of the law. In this case there is a very wide gap between the two.
You aren't going to change any minds here by arguing that the law technically allows abortions in this case. The issue is the enforcement and underlying context of the law.
I think the text of the law is quite plain. It's not a huge reach to imagine that this is yet another terrible instance of a medial error. Hundreds of thousands of people die every year because of them. If you want to talk about enforcement, then we have at least one case of a doctor having a lawsuit against him dismissed after he was accused of providing an abortion. Also, as of 2023, nobody had been arrested for providing an abortion.
I appreciate you trying to see things from my perspective, but the facts of the case seem pretty clear to me. Arguing that this is because of the abortion law doesn't make a whole lot of sense. If the law says "you can shoot someone if they invade your home," much the same as this law does, it's not the legislators' fault if I freeze up when my home is invaded and die. Medical error, either because of bad legal advice or a poor understanding of medicine, is more reasonable as an explanation.
If the facts of the case are clear to you but they aren't clear to doctors who actually live and work in the state, and are risking getting locked up for years or decades, and large hospitals that are part of gigantic corporations that have expensive lawyers working for them, maybe it's because they know more than you, or maybe it's because they are more worried about being cautious, because they know that the cops and the DAs down there are eager to arrest people.
All of which is to say, we don't even have to look at the text of the law, because people are telling us the actual effect of the law. You're pounding the statute but the statute's not the problem. The enforcement of the statute is the problem. So you can keep on pounding it, but your energies are misdirected.
If the law is being interpreted in court in such a way that the text of the law is being ignored for the sake of scoring more convictions, the state of Texas is begging to be smacked down for doing so. And that smackdown would be perfectly justified. The longer this obviously incorrect interpretation of the law goes unchallenged, the longer it will cause a chilling effect on the medical community that is truly trying to save lives. No, it is not easy to be the tip of the spear, but the state of Texas would owe them a great debt.
Yes they should have but didn't because of a vague law that does not lay out exactly when the mothers life is in danger. Does she have to be in pain? Conscious? Bleeding? Irregular heartbeat? Does the fetus have to viable? The law does not allow for interpretation so hospitals literally have to wait until the women is in cardiac arrest to act. So yes if this women was in any normal state with normal defined laws that don't restrict how doctors decide what their patients need. So yes they should have acted but couldn't.
The 2017 law allowed abortions in emergencies as defined in Section 171.002, Health and Safety Code. This is what it says:
"As certified by a physician" means the physician can decide whether this is a life-threatening emergency.
https://www.reuters.com/legal/texas-judge-allows-woman-get-emergency-abortion-despite-state-ban-2023-12-07/
Hmmmmm it's like the religious right nut jobs don't trust science and doctors.
Please see my reply to your other comment. I don't see how this has anything to do with science and doctors rather than some idiot giving fatally bad legal advice.
Did you read the article?
I did. Here's how I replied:
Elaborating further, though the odds of the baby surviving past the first year are only 5-10%, its life should still be preserved if possible. People can and do elect to have surgery despite a low chance of survival.
why did you link an article on trisomy-18?
I linked it because the abortion that happened in your article happened because of it:
Sure sure. Perfectly legal to do an abortion in Texas in a case of a medical emergency.
And then the case gets reviewed by a board of religious zealots who believe unwanted pregnancies (and by extension, pregnancy related deaths) are part of their god's divine plan. They determine if this was an abortion, or a murder. In Texas, a state where the only thing liberal is their application of the death penalty.
Can you see why what the law says and what the law does can be very different?
The definition of emergency is absurdly specific though. The corpse inside you can't just be dead, it can't just be decomposing, the fragments of putrefying corpse matter must be coursing through your blood at a sufficient concentration before anything can legally be done.
If she dies, then it was an emergency and you should have saved her. Jail.
If she doesn't die, then it wasn't an emergency and you shouldn't have done the abortion. Jail.
The problem is that legal jargon and medical jargon are very different animals. The legal is deliberately ambiguous, and the medical is hyper-specific... so doctors are left scratching their heads about things like "is the white blood cell count high enough for a lawyer to call this life threatening?" "Is the blood pressure low enough?" meanwhile the mother waits and dies.
"During a medical emergency" or "life threatening" are copouts that don't actually mean shit, and no doctor is going to risk going to prison to find out.
There's already been at least one doctor in Texas who risked legal consequences for performing an abortion, and he won out. And given that twelve other physicians stated a premature delivery should have been done, it's plain that something should have been done. Now she's dead, because apparently the hospital staff misunderstood a rather clearly-written law.
Any doctor that performs an abortion in Texas is risking a minimum $100,000 fine and permanently losing there license to practice medicine if lawyers, who are not medical professionals, decide it was medically necessary yet.
As a result, doctors in TX have been advised by their lawyers not to perform abortions unless the mother is literally minutes away from death, because otherwise you can’t prove that it was medically necessary.
In the case, the patient died of sepsis. Doctors couldn’t perform the abortion when she needed it because they couldn’t prove that it was medically necessary yet.
They knew that not performing the abortion would put mom at a much high risk of dying later. But they couldn’t legally prove that risk exists because all pregnancies involve some degree of risk.
If you want doctors to perform medical procedures when it’s medically necessary, you need doctors making that decision, not lawyers, not the state. That’s what Texas had before this law went into effect.
It’s literally created a trolly problem, it’s now better for the doctors to let some women die so they can save more lives later.
But we have "over a dozen" medical experts who say it would have been the correct decision, and the law explicitly allows it. If it's so obvious that over a dozen experts who never spoke to the patient could know it was the right decision, then how does a competent doctor actually interacting with the patient not know that?
Yes.
That’s the problem with this law.
It takes the decision away from the medical experts, and puts in the hands of lawyers and judges who may or may not have a different agenda.
The lawyers/judges would want to throw physicians in prison? And as of 2023, no doctors had actually been arrested for doing this. Actually, at least one got a case dismissed after the fact.
I can see you’re clearly not interested in understanding the situation the physician was in or discussing solutions that would have saved this patient’s life.
I’m not going to debate you further.
The article says what would have saved her life, so I didn't think that was at issue here. But alright. It was good talking to you, and I hope you have a good day.
So, therein lies the problem.
They couldn't take action before her life was in danger even though they knew it would be. So they have to wait until it's an "emergency" which is far more risky. And this woman died was a result.
This law greatly increased the risk of the situation needlessly.
She died, so that's an emergency. If someone is having a stroke and somehow doesn't die until three days later, that doesn't make it any less an emergency.
Do you hear yourself?
It was an emergency because she died?
She died days after it was too late for an abortion to save her.
If they performed the abortion when it would have saved her life, she wouldn’t have died, by your own logic it would’n’ve been an emergency.
And you’d be here arguing that the doctor should lose his license for performing an abortion when it wasn’t an emergency.
Yes. If someone is going to die soon after the problem is discovered, it's an emergency. I don't think this is a controversial claim. If someone gets hit by a car or has a stroke and has days to live, that doesn't mean we hold off on providing healthcare so they survive the incident.
It’s designed to be legal minefield. If I were a doctor I certainly wouldn’t do one. I don’t want to go to prison or be accused of murder for saving somebody’s life. It’s not worth it.
Can you please tell me how this is a legal minefield:
...
You do know that medical errors happens, right? People die from them all the time. This seems like a pretty clear-cut case of it.
What happens if they thought it was an emergency but other physicians might not agree, or after the fact when more information is available it turns out not to be?
So what happens is you wait and wait until your patient is going to die without a doubt… because you have to be sure, thus putting their life at risk.
Emergencies are often not so easy to characterize in the real world. Sometimes you have to make assumptions. Those assumptions aren’t always correct.
Or you could save your patient's life. The laws state if the physician believes there's a medical emergency.
I don’t think that’s what it says. Why include the medical records in the statement if we are meant to rely on the doctor’s belief at the time based on the information that was available? Shouldn’t it be enough to trust the expert? It rather looks like making sure there’s documentation for possible criminal prosecution (for murder!) if they’re wrong.
Sure, I can accept there’s a theory of exceptions, but I think it’s liable to scare away providers. However, I suppose I’m not a medical expert. I can point to the well lack of care situation as my example of this concern and the chilling effect the law has on providers doing their jobs.
I'm not a medical expert either, but I rely very heavily on physicians to remain alive. You and I both have a vested interest in our doctors treating us well. This looks like a tragic case of a medical error. This was, in 2018, the leading cause of death in America. It's not a huge stretch of the imagination. Even given the requirement to document it, with over a dozen people saying it would have been correct, it seems like it would be a very simple matter to prove in before a judge that it was necessary. The law also seems more geared towards collecting anonymous statistics as well.
This happened prior to the version of the law you posted.
[Can you point to which law before this happened prohibits abortions in cases of medical emergency?(https://guides.sll.texas.gov/abortion-laws/history-of-abortion-laws#s-lg-box-wrapper-34155545) Let's go through the list:
It's been the fucking wild west here in Texas due to new laws being pushed out then shot down so quickly, no one can keep track. Even the ones passed are written so badly, they can't be interpreted correctly. The following is from an article from ProPublica
Although US abortion bans – which more than a dozen states have enacted in the two years since the supreme court overturned Roe v Wade – technically permit the procedure in medical emergencies, doctors across the country have said that the laws are worded so vaguely that they don’t know when they can legally intervene.
This has been repeated ad nauseum by doctors on local outlets. It's meant to be vague and confusing.
Notice how that law is vague on the medical emergency aspects. When exactly is a women with an nonviable pregnancy a danger to the mother?
"Life-threatening condition" is a fairly wide umbrella. Given the number of people who die of sepsis every year, that sounds like a life-threatening condition to me. A substantial impairment is defined under federal law. Sepsis would likely also count there, too - it messes you up real badly, after all.
https://www.reuters.com/legal/texas-judge-allows-woman-get-emergency-abortion-despite-state-ban-2023-12-07/
That threat was because she could have sought a C-section. If I'm understanding this page correctly, one's fertility is reduced by about 13% after a C-section. If I'm not, feel free to show me how I got it wrong. Did that guy ever end up prosecuting anyone involved, though? Why would a judge side with the prosecution after a court literally gave her an order permitting her to do that?