‘MAGA abortion ban kills women’: Pregnant Texas teen dies after being denied care

Nevaeh Crain would have turned 20 on Friday. Instead, she is yet another American woman murdered by a Republican abortion ban.

After reporting on Amber Nicole Thurman and Candi Miller, who died as a result of a Georgia ban imposed following the U.S. Supreme Court’s reversalRoe v. Wade in 2022, ProPublica turned to Texas and told the stories of Josseli Barnica and Crain, who died last year at age 18 after a sepsis complication, the miscarriage of a daughter she wanted to name Lillian, and delaying medical care.

“On the morning of their baby shower, October 28, 2023, Crain woke up with a headache,” ProPublica reported on Friday. She soon vomited from fever and sought care a total of three times in 20 hours at two Texas hospitals. As the outlet detailed, “On her third trip, a doctor insisted on two ultrasounds to ‘confirm the death of the fetus’ before moving her to the intensive care unit. Hours later, Crain died.”

As journalists Lizzie Presser and Kavitha Surana explained:

ProPublica more than 800 pages from Crain’s medical records condensed into a four-page timeline in consultation with two specialists in maternal-fetal medicine; reporters reviewed it along with nine doctors, including researchers from prestigious universities, gynecologists who regularly treat miscarriages, and experts in emergency medicine and maternal health.

Some said the emergency room missed warning signs of an infection that needed attention. They all said the doctor at the second hospital should never have sent Crain home when her signs of sepsis had not improved. And when she came back for the third time, they all said there was no medical reason to make her wait two ultrasounds before taking aggressive action to save her.

“This is how these restrictions are killing women,” said Dr. Dara Kass, a former regional director at the Department of Health and Human Services and an emergency room physician in New York. “It’s never just one decision, it’s never just one doctor, it’s never just one nurse.”

Crain and her mother, Candace Fails, “believed that abortion was morally wrong,” according to ProPublica. “The teenager could only support it in the context of rape or a life-threatening illness, she always told her mother. They didn’t care if the government banned it, it just mattered how their Christian faith guided their own actions.”

Fails told reporters that she still felt the doctors had an obligation to do everything they could to save Crain, even if it meant losing the pregnancy, but that they seemed more concerned about the baby’s heart rate. fetus. “I know it sounds selfish, and God knows I would rather have both, but if I had to choose,” she said, “I would have chosen my daughter.”

Although a federal law, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA), requires emergency departments that accept Medicare to provide patients with “necessary stabilizing treatment,” which the Biden-Harris administration claims includes abortions. The Associated Pressrevealed in August that more than 100 patients across the country “have been turned away or negligently treated since 2022.”

Republican officials in multiple states, including Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, have fought the Biden-Harris administration’s interpretation of EMLATA, and last month the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review a lower court decision banning emergency abortions that violate Texas law.

ProPublicaThe reporting of Crain’s death comes as early voting is underway for the Nov. 5 election. American voters will choose the next president — former Republican President Donald Trump or Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris — and which party controls each chamber of Congress.

Democrats have campaigned heavily on reproductive freedom, highlighting Trump’s appointment of three of the justices behind the 2022 election. Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision that ended abortion rights nationwide and he plans to vote against a ballot measure in Florida that would ban pre-viability abortion bans in the state, where a six-week restriction is now in effect. In September, Harris, a former U.S. senator, supported eliminating the filibuster to codify Roo.