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.

  • davidagain@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    Vote Kamala Harris and your sisters, wives and daughters might stop dying for lack of health care when pregnant. Allow Trump to regain power and it will get much, much worse for the women you care about.

    • electric_nan@lemmy.ml
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      2 days ago

      What is the course of action that you expect Kamala to take that would prevent this situation in Texas? And if you have one, why hasn’t Biden done it already?

      • Yeller_king@reddthat.com
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        2 days ago

        Win the WH, win both houses of Congress, blow up the filibuster and enact national protections for abortion.

        Will it work? Probably not. It definitely won’t happen if Trump wins, though.

        Plus if Trump wins, Alito and Thomas retire and get replaced by 25 year old fascists and things get even worse for decades.

        I dunno if you were being sincere or intentionally obtuse, but it’s kind of straightforward that we have to win.

        • Altofaltception@lemmy.world
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          I am not American, nor the person you responded to, but in 2020 the Democrats won the white house, the Senate, and the House of Representatives.

          As an outsider looking in, why is there the expectation that Kamala doing it again in 2024 will have a different result?

          • Tinidril@midwest.social
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            2 days ago

            Unfortunately the Democrats need slightly more than a bare majority because some Democrats might as well be Republicans.

            Kamala has also stated her support for exempting this legislation from the filibuster, something Biden didn’t do. She wouldn’t technically have the power herself, but might get Senate Democrats on board.

          • SwingingTheLamp@midwest.social
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            Back in 2020, I read op-eds from several pundits who worried that choosing Biden was a mistake, as he ran on a platform essentially of returning politics to “normal.” They worried that once he won, people would settle back into the old routines, and forget about the simmering fascist threat and do diddly about it. I remember this well, because I feared the same.

            That’s pretty much what happened. Credit to the House January 6th special committee for finally forcing Merrick Garland to get off his ass and do a something about the insurrection… 2 years later. (Which made it easy to delay the trial until after the next election.) That’s about it, though. Hell, this wasn’t difficult to predict, given the way that Obama decided to “look forward” and not hold Bush administration officials accountable for their crimes.

            That is to say, if Harris wins, I predict more of the same. Folks on the blue side will breathe a sigh of relief, make excuses for why they can’t act, and do their best to forget about it until the next most-important-election-in-history. We (Americans) don’t have a plan to deal with it, and they’ll instead just get angry and call you and me disingenuous, or Russian bots, for pointing it out.

        • electric_nan@lemmy.ml
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          2 days ago

          That shit hasn’t happened in less contentious times, I literally cannot imagine it happening now.

          • Yeller_king@reddthat.com
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            Ok probably not sincere.

            The contentiousness is what put killing the filibuster on the table. In less contentious times, we didn’t need to destroy basic political norms just to save people’s lives.

            It takes basically no effort to vote. Things are clearly better with Harris winning than Trump.

              • Draedron@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                1 day ago

                You arent sincere. You dont bring any arguments to the table while all the people you are arguing with did. Why do you think Trump would make this situation better when he is the reason this issue exists?

      • WaxedWookie@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        Not actively, gleefully making things worse. Biden is doing this.

        Working to stack the Supreme Court, and triggering a constitutional crisis in the process because the Republican Senate will refuse confirmation, and the Supreme Court that was stacked with self-contradictory GOP bullshit will agree with them would be the interesting move that won’t happen because the Democrats are cowards and institutionalists rather than fascist monsters.

      • Chapelgentry@lemmynsfw.com
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        Who controls the House? That’s a better barometer of change but having a supportive president is paramount. Either have control of the house and overwhelming control of the Senate, or enough control of both that a friendly President signs the bill into law.

        Why hasn’t Biden done it already? Mike Johnson.

      • sour@feddit.org
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        What definitely will happen with Kamala is that women in New York or California don’t suffer the same fate next year as well.