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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The parallels to the case of the woman who died in Ireland are eerie (almost identical circumstances, also 17 wks) -and that galvanized a country to make historic changes. I'm so grateful that ProPublica is doing this reporting and I hope it breaks through. I worry it will not in the face of all the misinformation, right wing spin, and racism. I just keep thinking about her daughter, motherless.
Sometimes I think I'm really naive and privileged. Because I'm outraged too; I've been outraged for more than a few years here. I have to remind myself that I'm a man, and that I have this silly idea that human lives - that women's lives - matter. And how dare they. But that if I had been born female, I would have grown up learning and living the truth that they do not, that women are abused and harassed and assaulted and murdered, that it's been that way for millennia and that no one really cares all that much because it's just. the way. it is. I can sit here upset and saddened, and for most of you it's just another day. To echo Jessica because there's nothing else to say, I'm just so, so sorry. 💔