Pregnant and bleeding? Don’t mess with Texas.
Texas’ severe abortion laws notched another preventable death from a pregnancy gone wrong. ProPublica reported the death of Josseli Barnica, 28, in 2021 on Wednesday. She died days after the state’s S.B. 8 “heartbeat bill” took effect. Bloomberg Opinion asked: “Texas’ Abortion Ban Killed Josseli Barnica. Who Will Be Next?”
Nevaeh Crain, it seems. On Friday, ProPublica told the story of her tragic death in MAGAstan after the Dobbs decision in June 2022 triggered an effective abortion ban in Texas. Crain was an early victim:
Candace Fails screamed for someone in the Texas hospital to help her pregnant daughter. “Do something,” she pleaded, on the morning of Oct. 29, 2023.
Nevaeh Crain was crying in pain, too weak to walk, blood staining her thighs. Feverish and vomiting the day of her baby shower, the 18-year-old had gone to two different emergency rooms within 12 hours, returning home each time worse than before.
The first hospital diagnosed her with strep throat without investigating her sharp abdominal cramps. At the second, she screened positive for sepsis, a life-threatening and fast-moving reaction to an infection, medical records show. But doctors said her six-month fetus had a heartbeat and that Crain was fine to leave.
Now on Crain’s third hospital visit, an obstetrician insisted on two ultrasounds to “confirm fetal demise,” a nurse wrote, before moving her to intensive care.
By then, more than two hours after her arrival, Crain’s blood pressure had plummeted and a nurse had noted that her lips were “blue and dusky.” Her organs began failing.
Hours later, she was dead.
Read the rest at ProPublica.
Those of you headed to the polls (especially in Texas) might ask yourselves and your friends Bloomberg’s question. Who’s next?
NBC News reported in September:
The number of women in Texas who died while pregnant, during labor or soon after childbirth skyrocketed following the state’s 2021 ban on abortion care — far outpacing a slower rise in maternal mortality across the nation, a new investigation of federal public health data finds.
From 2019 to 2022, the rate of maternal mortality cases in Texas rose by 56%, compared with just 11% nationwide during the same time period, according to an analysis by the Gender Equity Policy Institute. The nonprofit research group scoured publicly available reports from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and shared the analysis exclusively with NBC News.
Furthermore:
Among Hispanic women, the rate of women dying while pregnant, during childbirth or soon after increased from 14.5 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births in 2019 to 18.9 in 2022. Rates among white women nearly doubled — from 20 per 100,000 to 39.1.
Also: Johns Hopkins this summer estimated “that infant deaths in Texas increased more than expected in the year following the state’s 2021 ban on abortion in early pregnancy, especially among infants with congenital anomalies.”
This, after maternal mortality (deaths during or after childbirth) in the U.S. declined sharply after the mid-1930s:
In 2017, at a time when maternal mortality was declining worldwide, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported that the U.S. was one of only two countries (along with the Dominican Republic) to report a significant increase in its maternal mortality ratio (the proportion of pregnancies that result in death of the mother) since 2000. While U.S. maternal deaths have leveled in recent years, the ratio is still higher than in comparable countries, and significant racial disparities remain.
Donald Trump and his MAGA movement want to roll back the last century. It was a time when death in childbirth was a leading cause of death for women, along with (if vaccine skeptic RFK Jr. gets a job in a second Trump administration) tuberculosis, pneumonia, gastrointestinal infections, smallpox, and more.
Beware, sister, beware
So take care getting pregnant in Texas. Depending on the outcome of this election, it could get worse elsewhere soon. Amarillo’s Proposition A, ““Sanctuary City for the Unborn Ordinance,” is part of a larger strategy to ban abortion nationwide (The New Yorker):
Proposition A is alarming enough on its own. But it’s part of a bigger strategic play. At a time when Donald Trump is insisting that abortion should be left up to the states, a fervent group of anti-abortion activists are working behind the scenes to achieve a different goal. “The Dobbs decision really was a pro-choice decision, by leaving it up to the states instead of saying that abortion is a great social, moral, and political evil,” Mark Lee Dickson, a minister from East Texas, who is the driving force behind the sanctuary-city movement, told me, referring to the decision that overturned Roe. Dickson’s goal is nothing less than a nationwide ban on abortion, enacted by the courts. The path there may well lead through the Texas Panhandle—which means that the fight against it is happening here, too.
Amarillo became the second panhandle city in Texas (along with Clarendon) “to reject both the original and amended versions” of the ordinance in June. But Lubbock, Abilene, and San Angelo all said aye.
The Amarillo Tribune in October reported:
On June 11, 2019, Waskom, Texas, became the first city to pass the Sanctuary City for the Unborn Ordinance. Since then, the Amarillo Tribune has verified that 69 cities have passed a Sanctuary City Ordinance in states beyond Texas, including Illinois, New Mexico, Nebraska, Iowa, Louisiana and Ohio. Lubbock is the largest city that has adopted the ordinance.
None of the 69 Sanctuary City for the Unborn Ordinances prohibit or ban contraceptives such as birth control. Mail-in pills that would induce an abortion and abortions performed within city limits are banned under the ordinances as well as under state law after the overturn of Roe v. Wade. No abortion clinics were in any of the cities that have adopted the Sanctuary City ordinance.
They ain’t foolin’ and if you fool around with them
You gonna get yourself a schooling
Vote accordingly. Tell your friends.