Woman dies after abortion care for miscarriage delayed over 40 hours: Report

(AUSTIN, Texas) — A 28-year-old Texas woman died in 2021 after her abortion care was delayed for over 40 hours as she was having a miscarriage, according to a new story from ProPublica.

Josseli Barnica was told that it would be a “crime” to intervene in her miscarriage because the fetus still had cardiac activity, despite her 17-week pregnancy already resulting in a miscarriage that was “in progress,” according to medical records obtained by ProPublica.

The medical team told Barnica that she had to wait until there was no heartbeat due to Texas’ new abortion ban, Barnica’s husband told ProPublica.

Despite Texas enacting several abortion bans after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, it was the first state to restrict the procedure by enacting a law that permitted citizens to sue physicians who provide abortion care after six weeks of pregnancy — before most women know they are pregnant — for $10,000.

Anyone who “aided and abetted” an abortion, by actions such as driving a woman to obtain abortion care, could also be sued.

Forty hours after Barnica had arrived at a Texas hospital, physicians could not detect fetal cardiac activity and she was given medication to speed up her labor, according to the report. She was discharged about eight hours later, according to ProPublica.

She continued bleeding but when she called the hospital she was told that was expected, the story said. When the bleeding grew heavier two days later, she rushed back to the hospital, according to ProPublica.

Three days after she passed the pregnancy, Barnica died of an infection, according to ProPublica.

More than a dozen medical experts who reviewed the medical records told ProPublica that her death was preventable.

“These experts said that there was a good chance she might have survived if she’d been treated earlier,” Kavitha Surana, the reporter who wrote the story for ProPublica, told ABC News Live. “No one can say for sure where the sepsis developed. But 40 hours with your cervix wide open in a hospital, that is not the standard of care to require someone to take that risk.”

After Roe was overturned, a stricter ban went into effect, penalizing doctors found guilty of providing abortions with up to 99 years in prison and fines up to $100,000.