Doctor’s told a woman they couldn’t treat her miscarriage because it was a ‘crime.’ She died 72 hours later
Josseli Barnica was suffering from a deadly infection from a miscarriage while at the hospital in Houston — but doctors had to wait to treat her due to the state’s abortion ban that limited how much care they could provide her as her baby maintained a heartbeat.
“They had to wait until there was no heartbeat,” her husband told ProPublica in Spanish. “It would be a crime to give her an abortion.”
In Texas, miscarriages fall into a legal gray area as doctors are up against a law that bans abortions after a heartbeat is detected.
The law went into effect on September 1, 2021. Barnica was diagnosed with a miscarriage on September 3 that same year.
The 28-year-old Honduras immigrant was 17 weeks pregnant when the miscarriage was “in progress,” hospital records obtained by the outlet show. After 40 hours in pain from the infection, Barnica delivered the fetus after there was no longer a detectable heartbeat. She was treated and told to head home, that her bleeding was normal. Three days later, she was dead.
More than a dozen medical experts told ProPublica that her death was “preventable,” explaining that waiting that long to receive care opened her up to infection.
Barnica’s cause of death was ruled to be “sepsis due to acute bacterial endometritis and cervicitis following spontaneous abortion of a 17-week stillbirth fetus with retained products of conception,” according to an autopsy report obtained by the outlet.
In 2021, the Texas Heartbeat Act stated that ”a physician may not knowingly perform or induce an abortion on a pregnant woman if the physician detected a fetal heartbeat for the unborn child …or failed to perform a test to detect a fetal heartbeat.” It threatened civil penatlties for anyone who “aids or abets” the peformance of an abortion. That law has since been replaced by a more strict abortion ban.
Barnica and her husband had a one-year-old daughter at home and were excited when they discovered she had become pregnant again in 2021.
But 17 weeks into her pregnancy, she suffered from cramps, bringing her to the hospital, HCA Houston Healthcare Northwest. The next day, she returned due to bleeding. The Independent has asked the hospital for comment. The 28-year-old was given an ultrasound which showed “bulging membranes in the vagina with the fetal head in the open cervix” and that she had low amniotic fluid, the radiologist wrote in her records, according to the outlet.
The miscarriage was “in progress.”
Barnica related to her husband the nightmarish scenario: doctors couldn’t help until the baby’s heartbeat was no longer detectable. The next day, one doctor on duty diagnosed her with an “inevitable” miscarriage and jotted down that she was providing Barnica with pain medication and “emotional support” while the heartbeat was still detectable.
On September 5, two days after she was admitted to the hospital, no fetal heartbeat was detected, so her OBGYN delivered the fetus and provided her with medication to speed up labor. Another eight hours later, she was discharged — but her bleeding continued that her doctors told her was normal.
Two days after leaving the hospital again, the bleeding didn’t ease up, it worsened. On September 7, her husband took her back to the hospital. Because Covid-19 policies prevented more than one person from accompanying the patient in the hospital room, he couldn’t bring in their one-year-old daughter.
