This story from 2023 is truly a sad leopards-eating-faces story, and I’ll admit it might not even completely meet the standard for the concept. To be fair to the family, I need to point out early on that even though this young woman felt pregnancies should only terminated in cases of rape and life-threatening illness, she and her mother also didn’t care whether the government banned abortion. This was just a decision over how they lived their lives as Christians. And now, on to what happened, in brief.
An eighteen-year-old girl died in Texas due to complications from a pregnancy that miscarried. On the morning of her baby shower, Nevaeh Crain woke up feeling ill. In less than 24 hours, she was dead from sepsis, caused by doctors unwillingness to provide a life-saving abortion under Texas’ new, draconian anti-abortion law.
Texas’s abortion ban threatens prison time for interventions that end a fetal heartbeat, whether the pregnancy is wanted or not. It includes exceptions for life-threatening conditions, but still, doctors told ProPublica that confusion and fear about the potential legal repercussions are changing the way their colleagues treat pregnant patients with complications.
The problem here, of course, is the law is not clear on what exactly is a life-threatening condition. Doctors have to guess when “sick” becomes “sick enough” to provide potentially life-saving care. Guess wrong, and medical professionals can face as much as 99 years in prison and loss of license.
And sadly for Ms. Crain, doctors chose to follow the letter of the law, not providing an abortion until there was no longer a fetal heartbeat. It tears me up to even think about this; politicians in Texas have fought perhaps harder than in any other state to prevent doctors from following federal legislation which requires emergency rooms to stabilize patients in medical crises, which is what caused this teen’s death. So, facing this harsh reality, doctors err to the side of caution and self-preservation, waiting as long as possible before attempting to treat these kinds of cases.
There is nothing that can be done to change this particular case, but just as Ireland overturned harsh anti-abortion laws after women were losing their lives to pregnancy complications, I hope America will do the same. I’m not optimistic it will happen during the coming fascist leadership era, but if we ever recover democracy here, we may still do the right thing and protect the lives of the actual living.