Donald Trump said last night that he would “protect” women “whether the women like it or not.” The latest horrific example of Trump’s idea of how he plans to “protect” women in a second presidential term was reported on yesterday by ProPublica. Josseli Barnica, who was 17 weeks pregnant, died in a Houston hospital after having a miscarriage, while doctors and nurses stood around and did nothing for fear of going to prison due to Texas’ abortion ban. I warn you, the story is gruesome and hard to read.
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.
You read that right. Barnica endured 40 hours of anguish and pain while the medial professionals at HCA Houston Healthcare Northwest stood around and did absolutely nothing.
Barnica’s death was “preventable,” according to more than a dozen medical experts who reviewed a summary of her hospital and autopsy records at ProPublica’s request; they called her case “horrific,” “astounding” and “egregious.”
Those experts included more than a dozen OB-GYNs and maternal-fetal medicine specialists from across the country, including researchers at prestigious institutions, doctors who regularly handle miscarriages and experts who have served on state maternal mortality review committees or held posts at national professional medical organizations. 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.
“If this was Massachusetts or Ohio, she would have had that delivery within a couple hours,” said Dr. Susan Mann, a national patient safety expert in obstetric care who teaches at Harvard University.
Instead, Barnica and her family had the misfortune of living in Texas, which cost them Joselli’s life. There’s much more detail about Barnica’s harrowing ordeal in the ProPublica article.
As the hours passed in the Houston hospital, Barnica couldn’t find relief. On the phone with her aunt Rosa Elda Calix Barnica, she complained that doctors kept performing ultrasounds to check the fetal heartbeat but were not helping her end the miscarriage.
Around 4 a.m. on Sept. 5, 40 hours after Barnica had arrived, doctors could no longer detect any heart activity. Soon after, Lima delivered Barnica’s fetus, giving her medication to help speed up the labor.
Dr. Joel Ross, the OB-GYN who oversaw her care, discharged her after about eight more hours.
The bleeding continued, but when Barnica called the hospital, she was told that was expected. Her aunt grew alarmed two days later when the bleeding grew heavier.
Go back, she told her niece.
On the evening of Sept. 7, Barnica’s husband rushed her to the hospital as soon as he got off from work. But COVID-19 protocols meant only one visitor could be in the room with her, and they didn’t have a babysitter for their 1-year-old daughter.
So he left and tried to get some sleep.
“I fully expected her to come home,” he said.
But she never did. Her family planned two funerals, one in Houston and another in Honduras.
THIS is Donald Trump’s idea of protecting women. And THIS is what would happen, on a much larger scale, if God forbid Donald Trump got back into the White House.
But WE’RE NOT GOING BACK. As president, Kamala Harris will proudly sign a bill to restore the reproductive health protections of Roe v. Wade. And she’ll need Colin Allred as a U.S. Senator from Texas to help her do that. Let’s get this done.
