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.
State medical licensing boards usually consider flouting the law to be unprofessional conduct so doctors are really in a bind here. You should direct your ire to the people who created this situation not the ones who are caught in it.
you didnt read my comment in the way it was intended:
everyone involved here- the doctors, the patients, the state medical board- everyone wants doctors acting in accordance with the oath they took. these doctors, while legitimately afraid of running afoul of the law, may have intentionally failed to help this woman out of that fear, and if they could have helped her, should have. the fact that “this law” exists is a question for another time and place, after she has received appropriate care.
if this law then causes a disciplinary hearing, thats how uts supposed to happen. the law can be brought into question. human beings with the requisite skills and experience to pass judgement on proper medical procedures can be consulted.
sorry, but people dont get to pass laws that cause doctors to withhold care out of fear, laws they only passed out of their beliefs surrounding conception and birth. if those doctors werent going to save that woman, who was? wasnt that literally what they swore to do? what they got that license from texas for?
you break the unjust laws. thats how it works.
im tired of oh standing up is hard
tell it to that womans family
ed to add: theres enough ire to go around. many people fucked up and they all share the blame
This oath you’re referring to is the Hippocratic oath, I’m assuming? A non-bnding oath that no licensing board or medical school requires beyond a formality? Doctors are not going to risk their medical license in the form of law-breaking, Especially with the Texas state AG saying they will prosecute