Josseli Barnica is one of at least two pregnant Texas women who died after doctors delayed emergency care. She’d told her husband that the medical team said it couldn’t act until the fetal heartbeat stopped.
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.
Leave it to reactionaries to confuse healthcare with genocide.
I've already told you that autonomous people should get to choose what to do with their bodies. That's clearly not a value that you hold, and want to give a fetus extra rights above and beyond the person upon whose body they depend.
You wouldn't need to give a reason to disconnect the person attached to you by the kidney; it's your body to decide to share or not.
You can try to reframe the issue, but the facts are clear.
Tell me, how is killing innocent people healthcare? If a human being isn't a person, then what is? If killing innocent people isn't wrong, then why do we outlaw murder?
So born babies aren't people either? They're not very autonomous. Nor are comatose people.
You're reframing the issue to justify killing millions of people every year. Why? It's not like those lives magically appear in a faraway land on earth once they're ended in the United States.
It's a good thing we have dialysis machines so this entire argument is moot, along with organ donations. If the entire premise of the argument is nonsensical, then so would any response to it. Millions of people dying every year is a thing that really happens. I take it you won't deny they're people, but somehow it's okay to kill them?
Also. "reactionary" was a title used by people like Mao Zedong to justify persecuting and killing innocent people, so that's a little clue about how you really feel on the topic of murder.
I should think it's more cowardly to insult people without explaining why they're wrong. Are you so deep in you own pro-genocide propaganda that you can't even articulate why murder is wrong? And if it's so cowardly to not respond, then why are you not responding to my questions? Are you calling yourself a coward? If so, I mean, you said it, not me.
I have just as much ground to call you a reactionary over your reframing of genocide as "healthcare," which is apparently such an obvious position that you don't know how to defend it.
So not answering a meaningless and irrelevant question about ethics is less cowardly than not being able to explain why murder is wrong or why some human beings are not people? If I brought up a question about using magic to kill gnomes, would you take it seriously?
Your eagerness to condemn others for not wanting millions of innocent people to die without being able to articulate why killing everyone else is wrong is really quite telling. As is your use of political labels used by dictators to justify killing innocent people.
Fetus. Could grow into a person if nothing goes wrong and the mother wants it to, could end up as a really heavy period after a week. Welcome to basic biology, since you missed it in school
Says the guy calling me a Nazi because I hate genocide.
I didn't call you anything, learn to read. Also: not a genocide. Your kind best stop trying to dilute the value of that word by applying it incorrectly
How is a fetus not a person? Every human being is a person. Sticking with an extremely broad definition of person is the only way to prevent a slippery slope towards justifying killing people further and further along in development. Trying to call certain human beings not people is a genocidal tactic.
You can't actually be so stupid as to not be able to spot the difference between a clump of cells and a born human, so don't pretend to be.
Things that might become other things are not treated as though they are fundamentally the thing they might become.
Sticking with an extremely broad definition of person is the only way to prevent a slippery slope towards justifying killing people further and further along in development
No, it's not. Fetus isn't a person, it requires parasitization of an already existing person to continue existing, it is very much not the same as a born human. The only people who try to equate the two are weirdos like you.
First off, I'm sorry I mistook you for the other person. I'll take back those claims.
Second, we are all "clumps of cells." A fetus just so happens to be a really, really small one at a particular stage of development.
Third, a parasite is, by definition, a member of a different species than its host. Therefore, a fetus is not a parasite.
Fourth, almost everyone on earth depends on other people to continue existing. The ones who don't are hardcore survivalists. Are they the only ones who get a right to life?
Maybe you are, you're certainly showing the intelligence level of one, but most people are far more than that. They're lived experiences, personalities, and all the other shit. By your logic a caterpillar is a butterfly, and that's silly
Third, a parasite is, by definition, a member of a different species than its host
That's a link to a cancer website, and it doesn't even load, so the attempt at Cherry-Picking is extremely poor, do better with your fallacies or you'll bore me
parasite. noun. par·a·site ˈpar-ə-ˌsīt. : an organism living in, with, or on another organism in order to obtain nutrients, grow, or multiply often in a state that directly or indirectly harms the host - well wouldja looky there, doesn't require a different species at all and, in fact, applies to a fetus too!
Got any more bad points to try and make because you don't understand basic biology or are you ready to admit youre ignorant and just go learn some shit? Nobody will be mean to you for admitting your ignorance and becoming a better person. Shit, we'd actually probably respect you then, unlike now
In one respect, they are similar: a caterpillar is the same species as the butterfly which it becomes, just like fetuses are to humans. In another sense, they are significantly different: no human society regards a butterfly's life as highly as a born human's. What moral ramifications are there for stepping on a butterfly that wouldn't be relevant if it was still a caterpillar, and vice versa? If there are none, then it makes no sense to compare the two on that basis.
Here are the Encyclopedia Brittanica and Wikipedia (citing a scientific textbook on archive.org that isn't currently available, but apparently it was at some point) stating that a parasite is a member of a different species. Since the link won't work, here is the definition given:
An animal or plant that gets nutrients by living on or in an organism of another species. A complete parasite gets all of its nutrients from the host organism, but a semi-parasite gets only some of its nutrients from the host.
I suspected you wouldn't settle for a non-medical source for something with a precise technical definition, which is why I used that page.
If we're just throwing whatever labels we want onto words like "parasite," then what's stopping us from using the same label for disabled people? Or born babies? Or children who still depend on their parents? Or people who depend on the structure of society in general? Since we've already slipped down the genocide slope of deciding that fetuses are parasites, why shouldn't we go a little further for the good of the human race? They're a burden anyway, right?
I won't be mean to you, either, if you admit that killing innocent people is wrong and so is erasing personhood from human beings. If nobody here can admit that, then their disrespect means nothing to me.