A Houston Mother Died After Doctors Refused to Treat Her Miscarriage
Earlier this year, a Georgia woman named Amber Thurman became the country’s first “preventable” death following the overturn of Roe v Wade. This week, Texas got its own case.
Josseli Barnica, a 28-year-old Honduran mother in Houston, died in 2021 after suffering a miscarriage at 17 weeks pregnant, according to ProPublica reporters Cassandra Jaramillo and Kavitha Surana. Barnica’s case is consistent with other, similar stories in which women were denied care. It’s also consistent with the research: Texas maternal mortality rates have increased by 56% since the state’s strict and cruel anti-abortion laws went into effect in 2021.
Barnica laid in a hospital bed for 40 hours, waiting, while her uterus was exposed to bacteria. Her husband told ProPublica in Spanish that medical teams told his wife “they had to wait until there was no heartbeat. It would be a crime to give her an abortion.”
A team of medical experts and doctors reviewed a summary of Barnica’s hospital and autopsy records and told ProPublica they “all agreed that requiring Barnica to wait to deliver until after there was no detectable fetal heartbeat violated professional medical standards because it could allow time for an aggressive infection to take hold. They said there was a good chance she would have survived if she was offered an intervention earlier.”
Barnica’s husband, who must now raise their 4-year-old daughter alone, told ProPublica: “I fully expected her to come home.”
Read more at ProPublica.
