By: Susan Oser NFBPWC Health Chair, health@nfbpwc.org

Our health committee continues to keep on going. While one plan is made it evolves and changes with more discussions and more voices in the mix. Our meetings are held on the 3rd Mondays of the month unless there is a conflict or a holiday. Our next meeting with be December 16, which will also be our Healthy Holiday party where you can share a healthy recipe, book, or dish you’ve made that night to share. They will also be collected to put into future Health Committee articles. Our signature event that we co-sponsor with Houston Methodist Hospital is Heart of a Woman, which is slated on February 7, 2025. Please see details below.

If you are a former member of the health committee or would like to find an area where you could be involved, please contact me at health@nfbpwc.org and I will put you on my list. The more you can contribute, the easier it makes it for me. I’d love to have you.

Healthy Thinking for the Month:

Here is a graphic from Mi Gen Michigan on post-election

self-care:

Health Awareness Dates:

December is –

Aids Awareness Month, Give the Gift of Sight Month, Honor Your Pharmacist  Month, International Sharps Injury Prevention Month, National Drunk & Drugged Driving (3D) Prevention Month, National Impaired Driving Prevention Month, Safe Toys and Gifts Month, Take a New Year's Resolution to Stop Smoking (TANYRSS) (12/18 - 2/12) Always ends on Super Bowl Sunday}, Twin to Twin Transfusion Syndrome Month, Worldwide Food Service Safety Month The following article is courtesy of Health Committee member Kathy Clevenger-Burdell’s research – The Texas Tribune [and posted in accordance with the Advocacy Platform: Health Equity and Justice section]

A Texas woman died after the hospital said it would be a crime to intervene in her miscarriage

Josseli Barnica is one of at least two pregnant Texas women who died after doctors delayed emergency care. By Cassandra Jaramillo and Kavitha Surana, ProPublica, Oct. 30, 2024

Josseli Barnica grieved the news as she lay in a Houston hospital bed on Sept. 3, 2021: The sibling she’d dreamt of giving her daughter would not survive this pregnancy. The fetus was on the verge of coming out, its head pressed against her dilated cervix; she was 17 weeks pregnant, and a miscarriage was “in progress,” doctors noted in hospital records. At that point, they should have offered to speed up the delivery or empty her uterus to stave off a deadly infection, more than a dozen medical experts told ProPublica.

But when Barnica’s husband rushed to her side from his job on a construction site, she relayed what she said the medical team had told her: “They had to wait until there was no heartbeat,” he told ProPublica in Spanish. “It would be a crime to give her an abortion.”

For 40 hours, the anguished 28-year-old mother prayed for doctors to help her get home to her daughter; all the while, her uterus remained exposed to bacteria.

Three days after she delivered, Barnica died of an infection.

Barnica is one of at least two Texas women who ProPublica found lost their lives after doctors delayed treating miscarriages, which fall into a gray area under the state’s strict abortion laws that prohibit doctors from ending the heartbeat of a fetus.

Neither had wanted an abortion, but that didn’t matter. Though proponents insist that the laws protect both the life of the fetus and the person carrying it, in practice, doctors have hesitated to provide care under threat of prosecution, prison time and professional ruin.

ProPublica is telling these women’s stories this week, starting with Barnica’s. Her death was “preventable,” according to more than a dozen medical experts who reviewed a summary of her hospital and autopsy records at ProPublica’s request; they called her case “horrific,” “astounding” and “egregious.”

The doctors involved in Barnica’s care at HCA Houston Healthcare Northwest did not respond to multiple requests for comment on her case. In a statement, HCA Healthcare said, “our responsibility is to be in compliance with applicable state and federal laws and regulations” and said that physicians exercise their independent judgment. The company did not respond to a detailed list of questions about Barnica’s care.

Like all states, Texas has a committee of maternal health experts who review such deaths to recommend ways to prevent them, but the committee’s reports on individual cases are not public and members said they have not finished examining cases from 2021, the year Barnica died.

ProPublica is working to fill gaps in knowledge about the consequences of abortion bans.

Reporters scoured death data, flagging Barnica’s case for its concerning cause of death: “sepsis” involving “products of conception.” We tracked down her family, obtained autopsy and hospital records and enlisted a range of experts to review a summary of her care that ProPublica created in consultation with two doctors.

Barnica’s autopsy report lists her cause of death as sepsis with “retained products of conception,” meaning tissue that grew during her pregnancy but remained after her miscarriage.

Credit: Highlighted and redacted by ProPublica

Among those experts were more than a dozen OB-GYNs and maternal-fetal medicine specialists from across the country, including researchers at prestigious institutions, doctors who regularly handle miscarriages and experts who have served on state maternal mortality review committees or held posts at national professional medical organizations.

If you are a former member of the health committee or would like to find an area where you could be involved, please contact me at health@nfbpwc.org and I will put you on my list. The more you can contribute, the easier it makes it for me. I’d love to have you. We will meet on the 3rd or 4th Monday of the month unless there are any conflicts or holiday forthcoming.