In the Days Before the Election, Yet Another Example of the Very Human Stakes of Abortion Rights

In the lead-up to Election Day, yet another report has proven the devastating toll of abortion bans on American women. Last week, a story published by ProPublica detailed the final moments of 28-year-old Josseli Barnica’s life, a Texas mother who died in 2021 after doctors delayed treating her miscarrariage for 40 hours.

According to the report, doctors told Barnica and her husband that they had to wait until her 17-week-old fetus had no heartbeat before intervening, saying that “it would be a crime to give her an abortion” although her miscarriage, per hospital records, was already “in progress.” Three days after Barnica delivered, she died of an infection, something that’s becoming increasingly common as rates of preterm premature rupture of membranes (PPROM), maternal sepsis, and infant mortality have risen in the wake of Roe v. Wade’s overturn.

Texas’s six-week abortion ban, precedes the fall of Roe by almost a year, and while nonprofit and mutual aid organizations like Buckle Bunnies are working to facilitate access to abortion, contraception, and reproductive health care across the state, the rising birth rate in Texas over the last few years demonstrates just how many Texas women of reproductive age are being forced to go through with pregnancies they might not have chosen to carry to term, had it been their choice to make.

Of course, Barnica is far from the only recent victim of anti-choice abortion policy. Earlier this fall, ProPublica published a report on the death of 28-year-old Black mother Amber Nicole Thurman, who was blocked from recieving a potentially live-saving abortion due to the restrictive abortion laws in Georgia. ProPublica ran Thurman’s posthumous medical records in September, leading vice president and 2024 Democratic nominee Kamala Harris to spotlight Thurman’s grieving family in a campaign ad devoted to the link between untimely deaths like Thurman’s and the reversal of Roe by a primarily Trump-appointed Supreme Court in 2022.

On Monday, 111 Texas OB-GYNs signed a letter to their state’s elected officials condemning the deaths of Barnica and Nevaeh Crain, a pregnant teenager who died of organ failure after visiting the emergency room three separate times before finding a hospital willing to admit her. (Crain had developed a dangerous complication of sepsis after doctors refused to treat her while her six-month-old fetus still had a heartbeat.) “The nature of the strict abortion law in Texas does not allow us as medical professionals to do our jobs,” the undersigned doctors wrote, adding: “The law does not allow Texas women to get the lifesaving care they need and threatens physicians with life imprisonment and loss of licensure for doing what is often medically necessary for the patient’s health and future fertility. Josseli Barnica and Nevaeh Crain should be alive today.”