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.
It really doesn’t. What it does is describe a religious rite that’s a sort of combined paternity test/abortion if she’s unfaithful. The idea being that the priest does his thing, she drinks the dusty water and if the child isn’t her husband’s she’ll miscarry on the spot. If she doesn’t miscarry, then God has proclaimed it’s his kid and he should have more faith in his wife.
There’s nothing in the description of it that would tell one how to trigger an abortion without divine involvement.
Being pro-life or pro-choice isn’t strongly genedered. It’s not like men as a class oppose abortion and women as a class defend it. I think you’d be shocked at the sheer number of women out there who oppose abortion, and the number of men who don’t. It would be more accurate to say that a swath of religious folks (Catholics and certain flavors of evangelicals) oppose it, and those in their social reach get pulled along with them, along with traditionalist conservatives who are all about controlling sexuality.
Not all men, I mean the specific men who passed this asinine bullshit.