Josseli Barnica is one of at least two pregnant Texas women who died after doctors delayed emergency care. She’d told her husband that the medical team said it couldn’t act until the fetal heartbeat stopped.

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.

  • dandelion@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    101·
    6 hours ago

    I don’t really see what is wrong with authentically egalitarian politics, so I’m inclined to think the “center” is just a euphemism for right-wing.

    If a left wing movement fails in its egalitarianism, like when the USSR had slave camps, then I think we should not think of that movement as left wing at all, it just fails the definition of being left wing.

    The common response to this is that it is a form of no true scotsman fallacy, which I think could be a legitimate concern since you might define a left wing ideal as the definition and anything failing to live up to the perfection of that ideal is not “left”. But on the other hand, I don’t know how else to consider some politics authentically egalitarian and worth supporting and others inauthentic or corrupt and embodying hierarchical or right-wing tendencies. Maybe there is no bright line we can draw or reduce to a logical equation, but I would like to think there is still some value in evaluating which politics to support (i.e. which politics are furthering egalitarian means or ends).