Nevaeh Crain’s family says her death is being used for politics
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Nevaeh Crain died from medical negligence.
So a few days ago, we did a detailed video about this ProPublica article. This is the story of Nevaeh Crain: ProPublica tries to frame her death as the fault of the Texas Heartbeat Law. There are a lot of facts in Crain’s case that make it obvious that she experienced major medical malpractice that you can’t rationally attribute to the Texas Heartbeat Law. In brief, she went to two different hospitals a total of three times where they dismissed and ignored her symptoms, did not treat her appropriately at all, and she died.
The other side tries to claim, despite a ton of contradictory evidence, that the only reason this would have happened is if they were afraid to treat a pregnant woman with a child with an ongoing heartbeat in Texas. This makes no sense at all. At the first ER they didn’t even assess her symptoms, at the second ER, she had ongoing signs of sepsis that weren’t responding to treatment, and they discharged her anyway.
Normally, they should look for a source of a possible infection, which would include swabs and samples and potentially imaging, none of which has anything to do with abortion, and they did not do that.
Notably, the source of the infection could be something that wouldn’t require them to end the pregnancy anyway, but we don’t know because it doesn’t look like they tried to figure it out.
Even if it had required ending the pregnancy, she was six months pregnant, so they would have induced labor for a live birth and tried to transfer the premature infant to the NICU, which is not an abortion.
Even if source control had required some kind of procedure that would cause the death of the child and could be argued to be an abortion, they would still have been allowed to do that because Texas allows abortions for medical emergencies.
In fact, the Texas Supreme Court has gone out of their way to emphasize that their laws do not require some kind of imminent, you-have-to-be-at-death’s-door kind of standard in order to intervene.
So when ProPublica came out with this story and tried to frame it as if it was about abortion bans, I was angry.
Yes, part of the reason I was angry is because I believe in pro-life laws and I want to defend them, of course, but even independent of that, this woman experienced lethal medical negligence. There are villains in this story, and they are medical providers who are so incompetent that they cause the deaths unnecessarily of their patients. ProPublica, outlets like it, and abortion activists defend them and undermine the seriousness of what they’ve done by trying to frame everything as if it’s just about abortion bans.
Crain’s family wants justice from the hospitals.
Here’s a follow up article about Nevaeh Crain. This one did not go viral. Specifically, her family is alleging medical negligence. They blame the death of their daughter and her unborn baby on what they call medical negligence on the part of two southeast Texas hospitals. Crain’s mother says,
I want them to pay for what they did to my daughter. I feel like they murdered my daughter and they just got away with it … Murdered my daughter and my grand baby and just got away with it.
Candace Fails, Neveah Crain’s mother
Nevaeh’s family says her death is being used for politics. They say the hospitals are to blame. Her mother says, “I want them to be going after Baptist and Saint Elizabeth because they’re to blame for her death.”
And infuriatingly, this journalist reached out to the hospitals to ask them for comment. Baptist hospital at least had the decency not to comment.
Saint Elizabeth, the hospital where she went for her second ER visit, where the OB who had a history of missing key diagnoses missed her diagnosis and discharged her when she had ongoing signs of sepsis, that hospital? The same hospital she went back to later and they were in no particular hurry and showed no sense of urgency about her situation, that hospital? The hospital where she ended up bleeding black old blood from her face before she died, that hospital?
They said they believe that the care they provided this patient was, “at all times, appropriate and compassionate.”
The medical community has always dismissed and gaslit women’s pains and symptoms of danger; this is a well-established dangerous phenomenon. Doctors and other medical providers who behave like this should be held accountable.
But abortion activists, the side that has deemed themselves the defenders of women, the side that has deemed themselves the defenders of healthcare, they defend this. They minimize it. They excuse it. Because they’re not necessarily interested in justice; they’re specifically interested in attacking abortion bans. If justice happens to coincide with attacking abortion bans, that’s fine. If it doesn’t, we see where the priorities are.
Texas has difficult standards for ER malpractice suits.
The original ProPublica article about Crain talks about how her family wants to sue for malpractice. The problem is that Texas has a particularly high standard for malpractice cases just specifically for emergency rooms. So the ProPublica article itself, it says, if Crain had experienced theses same delays as an inpatient, her mom believes, they would have been able to establish the hospital violated medical standards. But because the delays and discharges occurred in an emergency room, it’s a much higher standard, and they’re struggling to find an attorney that will take the case.
Abortion activists misconstrue this, too. We will say, “this was obviously malpractice,” and they’ll say “well if it was malpractice then why isn’t there a malpractice lawsuit?” They’ll try to argue that there’s no malpractice lawsuit because it wasn’t malpractice because the doctors were just following the Texas Heartbeat Law.
That’s not what’s going on here. What’s going on here is Texas has a very difficult standard for suing in terms of emergency rooms. Here’s the title that you can go look up, but basically they explain that the standard of proof in cases involving emergency medical care requires “willful and wanton negligence.” The Texas Supreme Court has elaborated on this: they’ve explained that willful and wanton means “the actor is not only consciously indifferent to the likelihood that his conduct will cause serious injury, but is willing that it do so … willful and wanton negligence is a higher standard than gross negligence.” It basically requires gross negligence plus some kind of intent or malice.
So if you are an ER doctor in Texas, and you’re just a blithering idiot and you end up killing someone, you can’t be sued because you weren’t willfully doing it.
That doesn’t mean such a doctor was following the law or medical standards. It just means it’s really hard to sue them if they happen to be in an emergency room. If they were inpatient, they probably could sue them.
Neveah Crain was pro-life.
As a final note, both this article and the original ProPublica article report that Nevaeh herself as well as her mother are both pro-life. So this is a pro-life woman with a wanted pregnancy where major medical negligence caused the death of both her and her unborn daughter, her family views this as the fault of the hospital and wants some sort of justice for the fact they negligently killed her.
Do abortion rights activists care about any of this aspect of reproductive justice?
No. They just care about abortion.
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