Previews of coming infections
“Women are voting early in huge numbers, far outpacing men,” Politico reports this week.
Among the reasons why? Pregnant women are dying.
ProPublica has the story of yet another tragic, preventable death. Josseli Barnica was 28:
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.
Barnica’s death was preventable, say a dozen medical experts. The death of her fetus was not.
Barnica is one of at least two Texas women who ProPublica found lost their lives after doctors delayed treating miscarriages, which fall into a gray area under the state’s strict abortion laws that prohibit doctors from ending the heartbeat of a fetus.
Neither had wanted an abortion, but that didn’t matter. Though proponents insist that the laws protect both the life of the fetus and the person carrying it, in practice, doctors have hesitated to provide care under threat of prosecution, prison time and professional ruin.
This is Texas, y’all. Under a Trump/Project 2025 regime, it’s coming to a state near you.
After reviewing the four-page summary, which included the timeline of care noted in hospital records, 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.
“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.
I’ve long criticized the left’s condescension that conservatives are voting against their best interests. People vote their identities. This year, women across the political divide have reason to vote both. Donald Trump is promising not what he’ll do for your but what he’ll do to you whether you like it or not. What he’s with Dobbs and brags about is killing women. He’s just getting warmed up. Women know it.
Think they’re joking? When the MAGA right is trolling, they’re not joking. They’re telling you exactly who they are.
Across battlegrounds, there is a 10-point gender gap in early voting so far: Women account for roughly 55 percent of the early vote, while men are around 45 percent, according to a POLITICO analysis of early vote data in several key states. The implications for next week’s election results are unclear; among registered Republicans, women are voting early more than men, too. But the high female turnout is encouraging to Democratic strategists, who expected that a surge in Republican turnout would result in more gender parity among early voters.
[…]
“In some states women are actually exceeding their vote share from 2020, which is at this point shocking to me,” said Tom Bonier, a Democratic strategist and CEO of the data firm TargetSmart. “I never would have bet on that.”
A quick tabulation shows women outvoting men in NC by 11 points, FYI.