Woman dies after abortion, miscarriage treatment delayed more than 40 hours: report

According to a new story from ProPublica, a 28-year-old Texas woman died in 2021 after her abortion treatment was delayed for more than 40 hours due to a miscarriage.

Josseli Barnica was told that it would be a “crime” to intervene in her miscarriage because the fetus still had cardiac activity, even though her 17-week pregnancy had already resulted in a miscarriage that was “in progress,” according to reports obtained by ProPublica medical documents received.

The medical team told Barnica that because of Texas' new abortion ban, she would have to wait until her heart stopped hearing, Barnica's husband told ProPublica.

Although Texas passed several abortion bans after the U.S. Supreme Court's 2022 Roe v. Wade repealed, it became the first state to restrict the procedure by passing a law that allowed citizens to sue doctors who perform abortion care after six weeks of pregnancy – before most women know they are pregnant – for $10,000.

Anyone who “facilitated” an abortion, such as by driving a woman to abortion care, could also be sued.

Forty hours after Barnica arrived at a hospital in Texas, doctors could not detect any fetal heart activity and she was given medication to speed up her labor, the report said. She was released about eight hours later, according to ProPublica.

She continued to bleed, but when she called the hospital she was told it was to be expected, the story says. When the bleeding increased two days later, she rushed back to the hospital, according to ProPublica.

According to ProPublica, Barnica died of an infection three days into the pregnancy.

More than a dozen medical experts who reviewed medical records told ProPublica that her death was preventable.

“These experts said there was a good chance she would have survived had she been treated sooner,” Kavitha Surana, the reporter who wrote the story for ProPublica, told ABC News Live. “No one can say for sure where the sepsis developed. But 40 hours in a hospital with a dilated cervix, that is not the standard of care to ask someone to take that risk.”

After Roe was overturned, a stricter ban went into effect, punishing doctors found guilty of performing abortions with up to 99 years in prison and fines of up to $100,000.