How Many of Us Have to Die?
How Many of Us Have to Die?
The anti-abortion movement planned for deaths like Josseli Barnica's
They are killing us. I don’t know any other way to put it. Yeniifer Alvarez-Estrada Glick. Candi Miller. Amber Nicole Thurman.
And now, Josseli Barnica—a 28-year old mother, whose smiling face in a selfie she took with her daughter made me weep as soon as I read ProPublica’s headline: “A Texas Woman Died After the Hospital Said It Would be a ‘Crime’ to Intervene in Her Miscarriage.”
Josseli died in 2021, before Roe was overturned but after Texas passed SB 8. Even though she was miscarrying at just 17 weeks into her pregnancy with no chance for the fetus’ survival, doctors told Josseli they couldn’t treat her while there was still a heartbeat. By the time her Houston hospital intervened, she had spent two days with a fetus pressed up against her open cervix, exposing her to bacteria. Josseli died of a preventable infection three days later.
I am heartbroken, but more than that I am just so angry. I am angry that this young beautiful woman is dead. I am angry that her now-4 year-old daughter will grow up without a mother. I am angry that we have to live in a country where our lives are treated as disposable. And I am really, truly furious about what I know will come next.
Anti-abortion groups will rush to send out tweets and press releases with phony condolences, insisting that Texas’ law allows life-saving care. They will blame doctors for not acting quickly enough, the hospital for not giving providers clear enough guidance—even pro-choicers for ‘scaring’ doctors out of treating patients. Anything to shirk blame and to wash the blood off their hands.
We cannot let that happen.
When Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America comes out with a statement promising that abortion bans protect women, I want you to remember that they lobbied against exceptions for women’s lives. When the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists (AAPLOG) claims that Josseli should have been given care, remember that the ‘care’ they’re referring to isn’t an abortion—but a forced c-section or vaginal labor. That’s because these groups believe abortion is never necessary to save a person’s life. They use language and push for laws accordingly.
Most of all, I want us to remember—and for all Americans to know—that these organizations and legislators knew this would happen. They knew women would suffer and die as a result of their laws and decided to pass them anyway. There is no press release or talking point that can paper over that truth: they decided our deaths were an acceptable trade-off for a political win.
When I say that the anti-abortion movement planned for deaths like Josseli’s, I mean it literally. In October 2022, I warned that conservatives had launched a preemptive messaging campaign to blame doctors and abortion rights activists for women’s deaths. Today, two full years later, we’re watching Republicans insist that it’s not bans endangering women, but pro-choice “misinformation” about the laws.
They didn’t just plan to avoid responsibility for our deaths, though—they planned to cover them up.
There is a reason that Republicans are disbanding maternal mortality review committees, or stacking them with anti-abortion activists. In Texas, where Josseli was killed, Republicans put a well-known extremist on the state's maternal death board just a few months ago: Ingrid Skop has made a career out of arguing that maternal mortality statistics can’t be trusted and that abortion bans won’t lead to maternal deaths.
This comes at the same time that well-funded anti-abortion groups are sowing distrust in maternal mortality statistics across the country, laying the groundwork to argue that the inevitable spike in post-Roe maternal deaths is just bad data.
Then there’s the anti-abortion cultural work: Conservative media outlets have ramped up coverage glorifying women who die for their pregnancies—like cancer patients who decline radiation—as the ultimate good mothers. They’ve published story after story of women sacrificing themselves for their fetuses in the hopes that they can make women’s deaths palatable. Positive, even!
It’s that reality-bending public manipulation that conservatives are counting on most of all. They want Americans to believe that it’s perfectly normal for women to suffer and die during pregnancy, and that Democrats are simply politicizing everyday tragedies. What better way to avoid responsibility for the last two-plus years of nightmares than convincing the country it’s all just business as usual?
Relying on America’s tolerance for women’s pain doesn’t just help Republicans shirk blame for deaths— but for the broad scope of harm people have suffered since Roe was overturned. After all, for every dead woman, there are hundreds more who have lost reproductive organs, gotten sepsis, or suffered terribly and unnecessarily. In a country where women’s suffering is expected, the anti-abortion movement can just frame those cases as a win—proof that their laws are working because the women didn’t die.
Patients who don’t appreciate losing their fallopian tubes or getting deathly ill before being given care will be judged as selfish—those who don’t understand that motherhood requires ‘sacrifice.’ I will never forget the Texas columnist who chastised Kate Cox for not wanting to carry a doomed pregnancy to term, writing that “suffering is part of life...It’s most assuredly part of motherhood.” As if not wanting to be a walking coffin is some kind of moral failing.
We know the truth: It’s not acceptable for women to be left lingering in pain in hospital rooms surrounded by doctors legally prohibited from helping them. It is not normal for women to get sepsis, or to force children to give birth. It is not normal for the government to dictate just how much horror a patient should have to endure before being saved. Nothing about this is normal.
Since Texas passed its abortion ban, maternal mortality has increased by 56%—a trend I expect we’ll see replicated across other anti-abortion states as more data comes out. Republicans would like us to forget that there are women like Josseli behind those numbers. Women who should still be here, smiling in pictures with their children.
For more on the anti-abortion movement’s plan to cover up women’s deaths, read below:
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Several parts of the Tribune article struck me:
The doctors treating Barnica “absolutely didn’t do the right thing,” she said. But she understood why they would have felt “totally stuck,” especially if they worked at a hospital that hadn’t promised to defend them.
Even three years after Barnica’s death, HCA Healthcare, the hospital chain that treated Barnica, will not disclose whether it has a policy on how to treat miscarriages.
Some HCA shareholders have asked the company to prepare a report on the risks to the company related to the bans in states that restrict abortion, so patients would understand what services they could expect and doctors would know under what circumstances they would be protected. But the board of directors opposed the proposal, partly because it would create an “unnecessary expense and burdens with limited benefits to our stockholders.” The proposal was supported by 8% of shareholders who voted.
The company’s decision to abstain has repercussions far beyond Texas; the nation’s largest for-profit hospital chain has said it delivers more babies than any other health care provider in America, and 70% of its hospitals are in states where abortion is restricted.
Abortion bans and how the laws are written bad enough, but you have for profit hospitals (HCA etc) who wont take a stand to back their physicians when they have to make a life or death decision. (if the doctor is willing to take that risk). The hospital administrators are also part of the problem.
I read somewhere ( I don't recall if it was here at AED) or another news article but there was mentioned a couple hospitals in Texas that will take cases such as this. The names were not disclosed. I wish I could remember more details regarding this issue. I remember being surprised and also confused. Clearly if there is are a couple of facilities it is on the down low.
That's all I got today. sigh...
Anyone who can look at the photo of Josseli Barnica and her baby daughter without crying doesn’t have a heart. But (and I could be mistaken here) my understanding of SB8 pre-Dobbs is that it allowed citizens to sue each other for a $10,000 bounty, but did not contain draconian penalties for health care providers/institutions (like hospitals). If a medical care provider/institution feels his/her/its hands are tied because of the enormous risk of criminal prosecution ending in decades to life in prison and career suicide in the form of loss of license, these terrible consequences for women cannot be said to be the fault of doctors/medical facilities. But if there were no laws pre-Dobbs mandating these draconian penalties, or any penalties other than maybe the forfeiture of a $10,000 bounty, then the fault really does lie with the doctors/health care providers/medical institutions.