Tag: Abortion

Texas Woman Dies After Abortion Denied

Josseli Barnica grieved the news as she lay in a Houston hospital bed on Sept. 3, 2021: The sibling she’d dreamt of giving her daughter would not survive this pregnancy.

The fetus was on the verge of coming out, its head pressed against her dilated cervix; she was 17 weeks pregnant and a miscarriage was “in progress,” doctors noted in hospital records. At that point, they should have offered to speed up the delivery or empty her uterus to stave off a deadly infection, more than a dozen medical experts told ProPublica.

But when Barnica’s husband rushed to her side from his job on a construction site, she relayed what she said the medical team had told her: “They had to wait until there was no heartbeat,” he told ProPublica in Spanish. “It would be a crime to give her an abortion.”

For 40 hours, the anguished 28-year-old mother prayed for doctors to help her get home to her daughter; all the while, her uterus remained exposed to bacteria.

Three days after she delivered, Barnica died of an infection.

A Texas Woman Died After the Hospital Said It Would be a “Crime” to Intervene in Her Miscarriage
Josseli Barnica is one of at least two pregnant Texas women who died after doctors delayed emergency care. She’d told her husband that the medical team said it couldn’t act until the fetal heartbeat stopped.

Georgia Woman Dies Due to Abortion Ban

When Georgia’s ban went into effect, Thurman’s pregnancy had just passed six weeks. According to ProPublica, Thurman scheduled a dilation and curettage in North Carolina, which still permitted abortion. But when traffic delayed her travel, the clinic — “inundated with women from other states where bans had taken effect” — could not keep her appointment slot. A clinic employee gave her legally obtained abortion pills to use instead. (“Her pregnancy was well within the standard of care for that treatment,” ProPublica reports.)

Unfortunately, upon her return home, Thurman suffered a highly unusual complication, with increasing pain and heavy bleeding. The North Carolina clinic would have performed a D&C as a free follow-up, but it was too far away. Instead, Thurman went to a nearby hospital. Citing medical records, ProPublica says that “doctors noted a foul odor during a pelvic exam, and an ultrasound showed possible tissue in her uterus.”

Usually, these signs of sepsis would be addressed with a D&C to remove the fetal tissue. But the LIFE Act prohibits “administering any instrument … with the purpose of terminating a pregnancy.” That made performing this normally commonplace and safe procedure a possible felony for the doctors. Hospital staff delayed the procedure for nearly a day, as Thurman’s condition worsened. Finally, hours after her organs began failing, she was taken in for surgery — during which she died. Her mother recalled her last words: “Promise me you’ll take care of my son.”

Georgia’s ‘pro-life’ abortion ban literally killed a woman — and she won’t be the last

France Adopts Constitutional Right to Abortion

France makes abortion a constitutional right

France has become the first country in the world to explicitly include the right to abortion in its constitution.

Parliamentarians voted to revise the country’s 1958 constitution to enshrine women’s “guaranteed freedom” to abort.
The overwhelming 780-72 vote saw a standing ovation in the parliament in Versailles when the result was announced.

DIY Abortion, One Person’s Story

This must never happen again. At age 14 in the late 1950s I was seduced by a man of 32. A doctor told me “You’ve made your bed, now lie on it.” Pregnant and parentless, I went to a drug store and bought multiple medications labeled “Not to be taken by pregnant women” and took them in large quantities. The minuscule fetus was aborted. I was fortunate that I neither died nor had a deformed child, and that 12 years later I could bear within a happy marriage a wanted and loved child who would not otherwise have been born.

From comments section of NYTIMES.

Getting an Abortion in Texas – Travel to New Mexico

Under Texas law, insurers are forbidden to cover abortions unless the woman’s life is at risk. At the New Mexico clinic, the appointment to get a sonogram and obtain the five abortion pills would cost the family seven hundred dollars. And, because the trip was so long—ten or eleven hours by car—they would also have to leave a day early and pay for somewhere to spend the night. The previous month, the father had ransacked his savings to make a five-thousand-dollar down payment on a three-bedroom house—a step up from the decrepit rental where the family had lived for five years. After renting a U-Haul truck for the move, paying utility deposits, and buying pots, pans, and a toaster, all he had left was fifteen hundred dollars—his emergency stash, “something to fall back on,” he said. He felt sick at the thought that he’d now be using that stash to secure a legal abortion for Laura in New Mexico.

The father understood intimately what teen-age parenthood entailed. Laura was born when he was a high-school sophomore. She was, as he always told her, a wanted child. But, after his relationship with Laura’s mother imploded and he found himself raising their daughter and, later, two younger girls, it had taken him a decade, and at times three jobs, to get his family off public assistance. If Laura had a baby, they might find themselves slipping back into the food-stamp life they’d left behind. More than that, though, the pregnancy threatened a particular dream he had for Laura: that she would press through this hard phase of her adolescence childless, and enjoy some of the fun, silliness, and high-school dance parties that he had missed.

One in four girls and women in the United States will, at some point in her life, seek an abortion. Yet, if the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade, which, in 1973, established a woman’s constitutional right to the procedure, the long journeys to oversubscribed clinics that have become a fact of life in Texas will almost certainly become the norm throughout much of the country.

A Texas Teen-Ager’s Abortion Odyssey
The Heartbeat Act is forcing families to journey to oversubscribed clinics in other states—offering a preview of life in post-Roe America.
By Stephania Taladrid

Abortion Rallies Across United States – May 14, 2022

WASHINGTON, May 14 (Reuters) – Thousands of abortion rights supporters rallied across the United States on Saturday, angered by the prospect that the Supreme Court may soon overturn the landmark Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion nationwide a half century ago.

The protests kicked off what organizers predict will be a “summer of rage” ignited by the May 2 disclosure of a draft opinion showing the court’s conservative majority ready to reverse the 1973 ruling that established a woman’s constitutional right to terminate her pregnancy.

The court’s final ruling, which could return the power to ban abortion to state legislatures, is expected in June. About half of the 50 states are poised to ban or severely restrict abortion almost immediately should Roe be struck down. read more

“If you can’t choose whether you want to have a baby, if that’s not a fundamental right, then I don’t know what is,” said Brita Van Rossum, 62, a landscape designer who traveled from suburban Philadelphia to join the abortion-rights rally in the nation’s capital, her first ever.

Reuters

Rock for Choice – 1990’s Music Supporting Abortion Rights

Rock for Choice (or Rock 4 Choice) was a series of benefit concerts held over the ten-year period between 1991 and 2001. The concerts were designed to allow musicians to show their support for the abortion rights movement in the United States and Canada.

…The concert series evolved into an organization managed by the Feminist Majority Foundation, which released a number of compilation albums featuring artists that supported Rock for Choice. The album Spirit of ’73: Rock for Choice included fourteen female artists of the 90s singing hits from the 70s[9] and was named based on the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision in 1973.[10]

The final Rock for Choice concert was held in 2001 and was emceed by actress Gillian Anderson.[11]

Artists featured in the Rock for Choice concerts included:

wikipedia

Back Alley Abortion – NY Times Commenter Remembers

Bob
Clinton, MA | May 19

If the Supreme Court overturns Roe, some states will make abortion illegal. If women can’t get a legal abortion, some will get an illegal abortion. And some of them will die. I know, because I’ve seen it with my own eyes. It was the mid-1970s and abortion was illegal in Massachusetts. She was a 16-year old girl from a blue-collar, Catholic family in Fall River. I was a young respiratory therapist working in the ICU of a Boston-based academic medical center. She arrived via helicopter, rather than an ambulance, from her local hospital because when she showed up at their ER, she was in full-blown septic shock. Which was the result of an illegal abortion. Since she and her boyfriend didn’t have the wherewithal to take her to New York City – the nearest locale where she could get a safe, legal abortion – she chose the alternative. And paid for it with her life. It took her three days to die. If she had lived – if she had been able to obtain a safe, legal abortion – she would be in her late 50s today, probably with children or even grandchildren of her own. So, spare me your pious rhetoric about being pro-life until you’ve sat at the bedside of a teenager, just starting out in life, whose body swelled up to twice its normal size, whose skin turned black, whose face was unrecognizable, and whose organs literally dissolved as they were consumed by the bacteria. All because the state, in its infinite wisdom, forbad her from obtaining a safe, legal abortion.

NYTIMES

Comment from this article:
Where Abortion Access Would Decline if Roe v. Wade Were Overturned
By Quoctrung Bui, Claire Cain Miller and Margot Sanger-Katz
May 18, 2021

Texas Outlaws Abortion

Ahead of Texas’ abortion ban going into effect on Sept. 1, NPR’s Michel Martin speaks with Dr. Ghazaleh Moayedi, an OB/GYN, about what it means for abortion providers and patients there.

MARTIN: Could you talk more about – without compromising their privacy, of course – like, what are some of the other things that patients have been saying to you as this deadline approaches? Is there heightened fear?

MOAYEDI: Yes. People are very afraid. People understand, right? They understand that the abortion that they’re having this week, last week, the week before, is something that they wouldn’t be able to have next week. They’ve been asking about it and asking, you know, if I were here in September, would I be able to get this?

And, you know, this is a story I’ve told often, but a few years ago, when our state legislator was debating a different bill – it was a bill that would give the death penalty to people that got an abortion and to providers who provided abortion, right? – something so extreme. And it didn’t make it very far. But I had a patient that week that came in and told me, doc, I know that I’m going to get the death penalty for this, but I need this abortion. That is very real.

https://www.npr.org/2021/08/29/1032259863/texas-ob-gyn-my-existence-is-in-violation-of-the-new-abortion-law