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A Pregnant Teenager Died After Trying to Get Care in Three Visits to Texas Emergency Rooms

www.propublica.org

A Pregnant Teenager Died After Trying to Get Care in Three Visits to Texas Emergency Rooms

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.

183 comments

  • Stop saying "died" - Another woman was MURDERED by ignorant texas bigots in their government and spiteful, irresponsible, freedom-hating voter base.

    cruz, abbott, patrick, gohmert, cornyn and cock-eyed Ken the AG, along with trump, corrupt SCOTUS majority and the whole gop giving them cover, are soaked in this woman's blood.

    She was a white woman, literally named heaven HEAVEN backwards, and she's still dead, you absolute cowards that voted to enable this. Y When will you realize that you're not safe from this, you're not different, you're not "one of the good ones" that will see some protections others won't. Go have someone read a short poem to you, commonly referred to as, "first they came for". There will be plenty of words in there you don't understand, but the gist is, YOU OR YOUR DAUGHTER ARE FUCKING NEXT UP - this dead teenager, who never saw her 20th birthday, is the latest Handmaid they throw on the wall as an example to others of what's coming.

    There won't be an official announcement when christian fascism takes over your area or else there would have been one a while ago.

  • We all predicted this would happen because we have a basic understanding of the world and a smidge of empathy. Unlike Republicans.

  • Around 1 in 5 pregnancies, that's 20%, end in miscarriage. There's a bit of a genetic lottery that is random within this crazy sensitive process of creating a baby. You can be doing everything right, but it doesn't matter. You can lose the pregnancy and many do. And then, statistically, their next pregnancy is healthy and without complication.

    There's no fault to a person in this progress, just like there's no fault to how a flower grows - some have more pedals, some have crooked stems, some never grow and stay seeds in the ground. Texas killing this child for losing a pregnancy is akin to them having you roll a 5 sided dice and shooting anyone who lands on a "4" between the eyes.

    Ignorance and fear rule the red areas on the US map. Of course those red areas are populated predominately by trees, lakes and mountains, all of which are likely more intelligent and empathetic than the few frightened human voters spattered throughout that share that very rural landscape.

    • Texas killing this child for losing a pregnancy

      Texas didn't kill her for loosing a pregnancy - Texas killed her by making her losing the pregnancy take too long by terrifying doctors out of speeding the process along, causing her to be in and out of hospital ERs repeatedly while doctors essentially played "hot potato" with her despite all of them knowing what needed done out of fear of being thrown in prison for a century if they did it, causing her to eventually develop sepsis and die.

      It's much, much worse than "killing her for losing a pregnancy", and exactly how awful it is and how it got to that point needs to be spelled out in detail. Otherwise you'll have people pointing out that the Texas law has an exception for medical emergencies, and it needs pointed out and doubled down on that by the time the doctors were reasonably certain that a conservative Texas court would agree with them it was a medical emergency (aka she'd already developed a systemic infection), she was already doomed.

    • The sentiment is there, but 1 in 5 ending in miscarriage is not 1 in 5 that would be deadly if a miscarriage happened.

      Also, that number is known miscarriages (and is the high end i believe of the range). Even more happen before the mother even knows they are pregnant.

      Part of the reason you don't tell people before the first trimester is over is because miscarriages before are common.

      • Respectfully, I don't know where you are pulling that equivalence from? I don't believe I said 1 in 5 would likely die from losing a pregnancy? The extreme of what's on the table being discussed is that Texas wants to overtly punish people for not being perfect fetal vessels - denying needed medical care and charging for crimes if they accuse that a miscarriage was coerced as determine by unqualified, backward religiously driven opinion.

        As you raise the point though, that "would be deadly" mention is dependent on the unknown of what happens when you deny basic medical maintenance to "common" conditions. Many miscarriages require medical abortion, regardless of how "smooth" they progress, to clear any remnants of the fetus from the uterus and avoid complications and dangerous bleeding, infection, etc that could harm that person or their womb and decrease chances of successful implantation, pregnancy and birth in the future, if desired. It's a horribly painful and emotional process, something that nobody enters into lightly and that often is required for willing parents to be having difficulty conceiving and dealing with that loss, on top of everything else mentioned.

  • This is exactly the goal of force birth policies.

    Women who don't survive are considered weak and must be cleansed for Republicans' perfect society. It's eugenics. Killing women is the point, in the minds of Republicans every woman who dies deserves it.

  • Reading this I remember something I heard from a show about people working in the ER where the, had something similar(pregnant woman comes into the hospital with something live threatening) "The life of the baby is currently irrelevant, because if we can't save the mother, the kid will Die too."

183 comments