It took three ER visits and 20 hours before a hospital admitted Nevaeh Crain, 18, as her condition worsened. Doctors insisted on two ultrasounds to confirm “fetal demise.” She’s one of at least two Texas women who died under the state’s abortion ban.

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.

    • newenlightened@lemmy.world
      93·
      20 days ago

      i’ve been voting for 30 years. hasn’t saved us yet. what’s the next step?

      EDIT: voting is important, but it’s not enough.

      • thatKamGuy@sh.itjust.works
        3·
        20 days ago

        Voting is simply putting a word in for a candidate to fill in a subordinate role to your company’s HR department.

        You won’t always get the one you pick, so it’s your responsibility to put forward the best candidate (primaries), vouch for them (voting), and keep them accountable to their KPIs (individual lobbying).

        ETA: Remember, you’re basically looking to hire someone to look after you, your family, your friends and your community for the next n years; it also takes a lot longer to fix something, than it did to break it initially, and fixed things still wear the scars of the past.

      • Cethin@lemmy.zipEnglish
        21·
        20 days ago

        I would argue it has, to an extent. Trump winning is why we’re in this situation. Had he not, the status quo of Roe would have stayed. Vote to restore it.

        • MrMcGasion@lemmy.world
          3·
          20 days ago

          And then once your person wins, shout at them every day about the things that are important to you. Pester and annoy them so much that they are both motivated to do what you want just to get you to leave them alone, and also so they have support they can point to to convince their colleagues to join the cause. We’d be in a very different place if we had demanded getting rid of the Electoral College even 10 years ago, and a vastly different place if we had gotten that changed 25 years ago.

          I know it’s a lot of work to stay loud about political issues all the time, but if you don’t use your voice, someone will take your silence as contentment and nothing will change.