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.
“Doctors involved in Crain’s care did not respond to several requests for comment. The two hospitals, Baptist Hospitals of Southeast Texas and Christus Southeast Texas St. Elizabeth, declined to answer detailed lists of questions about her treatment.”
The predominance of religion-owned hospitals in large swaths of the country is part of the anti-autonomy strategy. When I wanted my tubes tied along with my second C-section, I had a choice of the university-affiliated hospital rather than the Catholic one which wouldn’t perform a tubal ligation. But in many places, there’s no such option, especially in an emergency.
Those two in particular are in Beaumont, a particularly ass-backwards area of the state. One of its satellite cities, Vidor, is talked about even in Texas as being vitriolic in their racism. I’ve also been inside both of those hospitals’ emergency rooms, and wouldn’t want to be there if my life depended on it.