So I read this article a few days ago, and I have been haunted by it ever since.
This young woman, Nevaeh, had an “oops” pregnancy. As you may have already guessed, she was from a Christian background–her name, “Heaven,” spelled backwards, is popular in Evangelical circles. She, “believed abortion was morally wrong,” and “didn’t care whether the government banned it,” since she wouldn’t have chosen to have one anyway.
Instead, she decided to carry the pregnancy to term and raise the baby, with the support of her mother and her boyfriend, the baby’s father. Her boyfriend, the baby’s father, gave her a diamond promise ring, and she picked out a name–Lillian–and planned a baby shower.
On the day of the baby shower, she felt unwell, then developed a fever and began vomiting. Her mother took to her to the ER, where she was given a prescription for antibiotics and sent home. A few hours later, she felt even worse, and her mother took her to the other hospital in their town, which had an obstetric emergency room. They did some tests, including checking the fetal heart rate, and told her the baby was fine. The gave her IV fluids and antibiotics, recorded her increasing fever, fast pulse, and high fetal heart rate, and sent her home again. She had to be taken out to the car in a wheelchair, because her pain was so bad.
A few hours later, she started bleeding, and they went back to the hospital with the obstetric emergency department. There, a different doctor did an ultrasound and was unable to find a fetal heartbeat.
Under Texas law, a medical practitioner faces up to 99 years in prison for performing any intervention that ends a fetal heartbeat. So, at this point, the doctors were free to treat her like a seriously ill human being, and not an ambulatory vessel for a life more valuable than her own–however, they hadn’t recorded the first ultrasound. To ensure they could demonstrate compliance with the law, the doctor ordered a second one.
Somehow, that ended up taking about an hour and a half, during which time Neveah’s condition got worse. By the time the second ultrasound was done, and the doctor was able to order a D&C to remove the deceased fetus, she was too weak to sign the release forms–her mother had to sign for her.
Before they got her into the operating room, she was dead.
If they were going to make an exception for anybody, they would have made one for her: a pro-life, Christian girl, who responded to her unplanned pregnancy by getting excited about becoming a mom. Who was not just unwell, not just in danger, but actually dying when she was refused care.
The Texas fetal heartbeat law does have an exception when the mother’s life is at immediate risk. However, the Texas Attorney General has made clear–and several Trump-appointed judges have backed him up–to Texas doctors that they will be charged with homicide if he, who has no medical credentials whatsoever, disagrees with their professional judgment that a procedure which ended a fetal heartbeat was necessary to safe the life of the mother. That’s why the doctor needed that second ultrasound.
That’s probably why the other two doctors sent Nevaeh home: they couldn’t be accused of an intervention that ended the fetal heartbeat, if they didn’t intervene.
The leopards that eat people’s faces, like all predators, go for the most vulnerable members of the herd. The guy up front on the podium, getting rich off bloviating about how leopards just have to eat a person’s face from time to time, he’s safe–not because of any loyalty on the part of the leopards, but because others in the group are softer targets.
