Josseli Barnica died days state passed six-week abortion ban and doctors delayed treatment, ProPublica reports

Just days after Texas banned abortion past six weeks of pregnancy, a woman died after doctors in the state delayed treating her miscarriage for 40 hours, ProPublica reported on Wednesday.

Experts told ProPublica that the September 2021 death of Josseli Barnica, a 28-year-old mother, was “preventable”. Barnica is the third woman reported by ProPublica to have died in recent years after being unable to access abortion legally or having her medical care delayed.

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. Instead, many physicians say they have been forced to wait until a patient is on the brink of death – then attempt to pull them back.

  • ColeSloth
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    15 hours ago

    Half true. According to texas law, how it is written, the doctors could have aborted the fetus and saved the woman. They chose not to.

    The partial birth the 17 week fetus was in was impossible to be saved, and it put the mothers condition in one risking her life (obviously). That met both criteria needed to legally abort in Texas.

    Yes, the anti abortion shit is too strict, and if it wasn’t so strict they probably wouldn’t have refused to abort. But it was still at least partially (substantially) on the fault of the doctor/hospital that she died. They let her die because it may have caused some red tape.

    • Bytemeister@lemmy.world
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      2 hours ago

      From another thread…

      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 are very different?