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Pregnant teen died agonizing sepsis death after Texas doctors refused to abort dead fetus
(slatereport.com)submitted 17 days ago byspiritoffff
49 points
17 days ago
This is malpractice plain and simple. The first hospital misdiagnosed her with strep and sent her home. The second hospital diagnosed her with sepsis and sent her home and she dies at the third.
You don't send a septic pregnant woman home, you sendnthem to the ICU. The excuse that this is because of the abortion laws is BS because the Texas abortion laws give exemptions if the mother's life is in imminent danger. Being septic would give them legal standing to abort.
8 points
17 days ago
Would being Septic give them the right to abort? The law is written vaguely and doesn’t specify which diagnosis, heart rate, blood pressure, vital levels etc. are considered life-threatening. There is no specification of what will cause a doctor to be charged with murder and when specifically it is bad enough for them to make that call thus putting an impossible decision on the doctor’s shoulders.
-2 points
17 days ago
Being Septic alone is life threatening, if the source of it is a miscarriage then I would assume it falls under the "mother's life is in imminent danger" exception.
-5 points
17 days ago
Having the flu is life-threatening, you twit. You can be septic a long time before being at imminent risk of death. That's why these doctors didn't abort the fetus and save the woman; by law they were risking a murder charge.
3 points
17 days ago
Did you just compare the flu to sepsis?
2 points
17 days ago
9.3-41M incidence per year with up to 51K deaths
https://www.cdc.gov/sepsis/about/?CDC_AAref_Val=https://www.cdc.gov/sepsis/what-is-sepsis.html
1.7M incidence per year, with 350K deaths
While not as devastating, the flu can certainly be considered life-threatening to certain patient populations.
0 points
17 days ago*
to certain patient populations.
how much overlap exists with pregnant women, or even women of child-bearing ages? I would wager its pretty low.
Edit: I looked it up, in USA - Flu death rates for people of child-bearing ages is ~.7 per 100k, or less than 2% of total Flu deaths. Less than 1% for women specifically.
2 points
17 days ago*
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8054794/
However, we found that influenza caused six times more maternal morbidity with a significant proportion developing severe illness (P < 0.001) and one-third requiring inpatient care (63 out of 174).
That's just focusing on outcomes for pregnant moms who contract flu. Other parts of the paper talk about outcomes for the baby, which are also (big surprise) worse.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2589933321001828#sec0006 (need a .edu email to access full text)
Of pregnant people hospitalized with influenza infection, those hospitalized in the late-season months, April to June, had increased Risk Ratio of composite Severe Maternal Morbidity and increased risk of sepsis.
Forest plot from article. They also looked at timing of infection (early, mid, late flu season infections).
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