Candace Fails screamed for someone in the Texas hospital to help her pregnant daughter. “Do something,” she pleaded, on the morning of Oct. 29, 2023.
Nevaeh Crain was crying in pain, too weak to walk, blood staining her thighs. Feverish and vomiting the day of her baby shower, the 18-year-old had gone to two different emergency rooms within 12 hours, returning home each time worse than before.
The first hospital diagnosed her with strep throat without investigating her sharp abdominal cramps. At the second, she screened positive for sepsis, a life-threatening and fast-moving reaction to an infection, medical records show. But doctors said her six-month fetus had a heartbeat and that Crain was fine to leave.
Now on Crain’s third hospital visit, an obstetrician insisted on two ultrasounds to “confirm fetal demise,” a nurse wrote, before moving her to intensive care.
By then, more than two hours after her arrival, Crain’s blood pressure had plummeted and a nurse had noted that her lips were “blue and dusky.” Her organs began failing.
Hours later, she was dead.
Fails, who would have seen her daughter turn 20 this Friday, still cannot understand why Crain’s emergency was not treated like an emergency.
But that is what many pregnant women are now facing in states with strict abortion bans, doctors and lawyers have told ProPublica.
Around 1 in 5 pregnancies, that’s 20%, end in miscarriage. There’s a bit of a genetic lottery that is random within this crazy sensitive process of creating a baby. You can be doing everything right, but it doesn’t matter. You can lose the pregnancy and many do. And then, statistically, their next pregnancy is healthy and without complication.
There’s no fault to a person in this progress, just like there’s no fault to how a flower grows - some have more pedals, some have crooked stems, some never grow and stay seeds in the ground. Texas killing this child for losing a pregnancy is akin to them having you roll a 5 sided dice and shooting anyone who lands on a “4” between the eyes.
Ignorance and fear rule the red areas on the US map. Of course those red areas are populated predominately by trees, lakes and mountains, all of which are likely more intelligent and empathetic than the few frightened human voters spattered throughout that share that very rural landscape.
Texas didn’t kill her for loosing a pregnancy - Texas killed her by making her losing the pregnancy take too long by terrifying doctors out of speeding the process along, causing her to be in and out of hospital ERs repeatedly while doctors essentially played “hot potato” with her despite all of them knowing what needed done out of fear of being thrown in prison for a century if they did it, causing her to eventually develop sepsis and die.
It’s much, much worse than “killing her for losing a pregnancy”, and exactly how awful it is and how it got to that point needs to be spelled out in detail. Otherwise you’ll have people pointing out that the Texas law has an exception for medical emergencies, and it needs pointed out and doubled down on that by the time the doctors were reasonably certain that a conservative Texas court would agree with them it was a medical emergency (aka she’d already developed a systemic infection), she was already doomed.