Two Texas Pregnant Young Women Are Now Dead Thanks To Texas's Abortion Ban

Josseli, 28 and Nevaeh , just 18, are the 3rd & 4th American women to die from Trump abortion bans. Texas hospitals refused to give them timely lifesaving care after they miscarried.

Josseli Barnica and her daughter in 2020 Credit:Courtesy of the Barnica family to ProPublica

Donald Trump is insisting at his rallies that he “will protect women”, “whether they like it or not “.

What a bunch of misogynist crap. Set aside his patriarchal dictate that HE alone will protect 169 million of us. This narcissistic wannabe tyrant has done everything he can to make women suffer near lethal health risks, lose their fertility, be forced to carry non viable fetuses to term and now two more women have died under his ‘protection.’

These were young women, beloved to their families and friends, carrying wanted pregnancies who are dead because they miscarried those babies and were sent away from hospitals that feared treating them due to Texas’s’ Gilead -like abortion ban.

Donald Trump still proudly brags that he “killed Roe V Wade” by appointing the three right wing justices to the Supreme Court that gave that body the votes to overturn a 50 year right to reproductive freedom for American women.

Now Donald Trump bears direct responsibility for the deaths of Josseli Barnica and Nevaeh Crain. And he will be responsible for the deaths of thousands of women in this country if he becomes president because he will end abortion in America.

He will follow what is promised in Project 2025 and that is to eliminate abortion in this country without even having to pass legislation to ban it. He will enforce the 1873 Comstock Act and have his FDA chief withdraw the abortion pills from the market.

Legal abortion in America will end.

Many, many more women like Josseli and Nevaeh will die and they will never get to have the babies and families that they wanted in their lives.

There is nothing pro -life about abortion bans. They are death traps to women.

If you have any friends, family members, acquaintances or men in your lives who still don’t see reproductive freedom as something that can affect them personally so they plan to vote for Donald Trump on Nov 5th, please, please talk to them.

Josseli or Nevaeh could be their daughter, their wife, their girlfriend, their granddaughter, their friend. Abortion bans don’t just kill ‘the Other’ women. They don’t just ‘kill women using abortion as birth control’ as some wildly misinformed people think.

They kill American women with hopes and dreams just like they have and they deserve to live.

Here’s what happened to Josseli and Nevaeh who were robbed of those hopes and dreams by Donald Trump.

Joesseli Barnica, was a young wife and mom of a one year-old daughter who died from a lethal sepsis infection after an agonizing miscarriage in Texas. For 40 hours Barnica lay in a major Houston hospital begging for medical help as she waited for her 17 week inviable fetus to expel from her uterus naturally.

Doctors however were terrified by the threat of Texas’s 2021 abortion ban, Senate Bill 8 and refused to provide the 28 year- old mom with what used to be the normal standard of care - pre abortion ban - for a miscarriage which was a D & C ( dilation & curettage ) to remove the dying fetus from her uterus.

Thanks to Texas enacting the very first abortion ban in the country, which prohibited abortions as soon as a fetal heartbeat could be heard, doctors treating Barnica felt forced to wait until they could no longer detect a heartbeat from her fetus.

While she waited with her womb exposed to bacteria, she developed an infection of deadly sepsis. She died on Sept 7, 2021.

She is dead and her little daughter has no mother. So much for being ‘protected’ by Trump.

A dozen medical experts who reviewed both Josseli’s hospital and autopsy reports for ProPublica called her death “preventable,” “horrific,” “astounding” and “egregious.”

Neveah Crain was just 18 years- old and thrilled to be pregnant after graduating high school in Vidor, Texas. She and her boyfriend Randall Broussard had already talked about starting to have a family together. Neveah and her mom Candace Fails were excitedly imagining how adorable her expected baby girl would look in little dresses.

Crain planned to call her daughter , Lillian.

But trouble began on the morning of her baby shower when she was six months pregnant. It started with a headache but by the time the party began on Oct 28, 2023 Crain was nauseous vomiting and running a fever.

Nevertheless, the expectant mom tried to tough it out as she opened her gifts until 3 pm , when her boyfriend Broussard drove her to the ER at Baptist Hospitals of Southeast Texas.

This was the first of Nevaeh’s three hospital visits in less than 24 hours during which she was repeatedly treated with with a complete lack of urgency, misdiagnosed and sent away from the ERs .

This experience has been reported by other pregnant Texas women suffering from medical emergencies ever since Texas’s merciless abortion bans became law.

By the time Crain was vomiting, suffering from severe abdominal pain and an abnormally high pulse rate, Texans were living under an even more extreme abortion ban than Senate Bill 8.

Now abortion was banned from conception, with no exceptions for even rape or incest. Women could only be given an abortion if they were close to death or at risk of substantial impairment of a major bodily function.

Doctors were faced with 99 year prison sentences, $100,000 fines and the loss of their medical licenses if they dared to provide an abortion to any woman, who might not be considered near death enough legally to qualify for one.

Texas women like Amanda Zurawski, whose water broke at 18 weeks, were being forced to wait until they were suffering from potentially lethal sepsis infections before they could be given abortions. Zurawski nearly died twice and became infertile from sepsis which left her fallopian tubes blocked by scar tissue.

Is it any wonder that Crain was treated like an “untouchable” by multiple doctors who saw her at two hospitals.

At Baptist Hospital she was diagnosed with strep throat, given a prescription for antibiotics and sent home but by about 3 am that night Neveah was in so much pain that her mom drove her to a second hospital, hospital in town, Christus Southeast Texas St.

After just a couple of hours, Crain was again discharged despite showing signs of sepsis, a move that two doctors who reviewed her medical reports say should not have happened. They insist that she should have been admitted to the hospital.

“She should have never left, never left,” Elise Boos, an OB-GYN in Tennessee told ProPublica.

Chillingly Dr. Dara Kass, New York emergency physician said that when Christus Southeast Texas discharged Nevaeh, they were “pushing her down the path of no return.”

And by 9 am Crain and her mother, Candace were back at the hospital as she bled from her uterus and felt faint. There despite the fact that a doctor detected no heartbeat from her uterus, urgent care for the 18 year old was delayed for two hours while the OBGYN on duty ordered two ultra sounds to confirm that the fetus had died.

After all, Texas law banned abortions of a still living fetus …

It wasn’t until 11: 20 after the second ultra sound was completed, her blood pressure was plunging and she was drifting in out out of unconsciousness, that Crain was finally wheeled into the ICU.

Her mother signed a release for an “unplanned dilation and curettage” or “unplanned cesarean section.”

But it was too late. After all the delays and misdiagnosis from the previous day and she had developed a dangerous complication of sepsis known as disseminated intravascular coagulation and was bleeding internally.

Her mother Candace Fails screamed for someone in the Texas hospital to help her Neveah. “Do something!”

But her tears and screams went unheeded. Neveah died minutes later. Less than 24 hours after she was sent home from the first hospital she visited for medical help.

Crain had been treated like a hot potato, too dangerous to touch.

This is the reality that we all have to face now - women suffering from pregnancy complications in Trump’s America have become ‘hot potatoes’ and ‘untouchables’.

Doctors and hospitals don’t want to treat pregnant women in medical trouble for fear of being criminally prosecuted for providing abortions.

Josseli Barnica and Neveah Crain who carried wanted pregnancies are dead - ensnared by strict and punitive abortion bans written by mostly male Republican legislators.

Republican politicians who know nothing about women’s bodies - who are not doctors - have gleefully followed Trump’s cruel lead and have enacted the most extreme, merciless abortion bans they could think of.

Texas’s Attorney General Ken Paxton has fought relentlessly to prevent hospitals from following the federal EMTALA law which would require state hospitals to provide abortions in order to stabilize a woman’s health.

He has threatened to prosecute doctors and hospitals who might provide abortions to women carrying fetus’s with fatal conditions who won’t survive birth.

Is it any surprise that maternal mortality has soared in Texas by 56% since the state’s first ban was enacted. Infant deaths surged by 13% in the year after Texas’s abortion ban became law in 2021.

So much forRepublican’s claim that they are the party of ‘family values’. They are the party that destroys families.

Josselli Barnica’s daughter is motherless and her husband is a single dad thanks to the state’s abortion ban.

Nevaeh Crain will now never have another baby and her own family. Her mother Candace Fails, has been deprived of her daughter and grandchildren.

Donald Trump is not “pro life.” He is a purveyor of death.

If he is elected president, there will be no fleeing to the states which currently protect abortion access.

Doctors throughout the country will be too terrorized to treat women like Josseli and Nevaeh suffering from miscarriages and others with unviable ectopic and molar pregnancies or other serious pregnancy complications.

If you don’t want this for your future or the future of the women and girls that you love, please try to prevail on “undecideds’ or those who don’t plan to get off the couch and vote. Try to get them to read this and to think about Josseli and Nevaeh and vote for Kamala Harris and Democratic politicians who truly will will truly protect ‘life’ by supporting reproductive freedom for all American women.