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I agree that ProPublica falls somewhere between “biased” and “disingenuous,” and I tried not to rely on their testimonials. It is unfortunately difficult to find reporting which doesn’t trace back to those articles.
How would you interpret the Barnica case? Did the elevated risk of sepsis, which would then qualify as life-threatening, itself qualify as life-threatening? Does preventing the infection make the abortion unnecessary? Rov_Scam described it as
Now, I do think it’s reasonable to ask what happened to the potential prosecutions. I wasn’t able to find anything other than Texas v. Rojas, which as you noted has gone quite poorly for the state. The fact that it took nearly 3 years between Dobbs and those charges suggests that either Texas isn’t really willing to go after providers or that illegal abortions are in fact hard to find. This is compatible with a strong chilling effect, but it’s not good evidence for it.
Uh, just realized that the 'days later' bit might have come across as more conspiratorial than the statistics argument I intended, so to spell the statistics out, as far as I can tell, Texas alone has somewhere on the order of 2k second-trimester miscarriages every year, Fermi estimate of a hundred-plus high-risk cases (ruptured membrane or extremely premature labor with a live-but-doomed fetus), you'd expect a couple deaths a year in Texas alone, and tens of cases with gruesome near-death experiences or permanent physical harm. Across all states with second-trimester bans, you'd expects tens of deaths and hundreds of cases. Not every one of those is going to consent to public news coverage, and presumably ProPublica is doing at least some filtering to remove the most arguable cases. It's only weak information, rather than strong. It's still information.
To return to conspiracy, though, I do want to spell out exactly how poorly the cases ProPublica and company does provide do look with a skeptical eye. Walker is one of the most recent, and she died in October 2024, and the story ProPublica offers is terrifying: "Although one doctor documented in her medical record that she was at “high risk of clinical deterioration and/or death,” she was told over and over again that she didn’t need to worry, her relatives say. More than 90 doctors were involved in Walker’s care, but not one offered her the option to end her pregnancy, according to medical records."
I have another quote, though. Texas's Supreme Court held, in May 2024 :
and :
The state's highest court had ruled, without caveat, almost five months before Walker's death. The doctors and the hospital still acted without urgency.
Even by ProPublica's own analysis, this ended up driven heavily by hospital policy in the state with the ban. Notably, Paxton has not arrested, charged, or seriously threatened a single one of the Dallas hospitals or practitioners that ProPublica praises.
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I can't give a confident analysis, because I don't have the full information. But I don't think ProPublica's interpretation matches either the text of the statute, nor even the more uncharitable form of the legislative intent. Even ignoring how broad "the exercise of reasonable medical judgment", we normally don't treat prospective rules as bounded by the current situation: saying 'this situation is only going to cause sepsis' is like saying 'this sepsis isn't going to kill you immediately', saying 'we can just treat the infection but not the cause of the infection' is the equivalent of trying to defeat a self-defense case by saying 'you could have just shot it out of their hand'. There is no imminence requirement in the statute, despite ProPublica's direst efforts to imply one, and that's since been supported by the Texas Supreme Court and the relevant medical boards.
That doesn't stop someone from bringing a completely frivolous case, but the same goes for a situation without the law entirely.
Here's where I'll point out that ProPublica is conflating multiple separate legal environments. September 2021 was firmly pre-Dobbs, the defensive decisions here were against SB8's purely civil damages and Texas's not-relevant-here D&E and 20-week bans. There was no risk of prosecution in Barnica's situation; the tradeoff was just civil suit for malpractice versus civil suit under SB8 for abortion.
Now, maybe the doctors and hospitals made the correct (if incredibly immoral) financial tradeoff, here, since they didn't get a malpractice lawsuit! But that's a whole different calculus, and one undermined by there being literally zero successful SB8 civil trials, literally ever.
Barnica died literally days after SB8 went into effect, and her medical situation is not an uncommon one from a pure statistics perspective, nor one driven by abortion providers. Unless SB8's chilling effect dropped the number of mid-pregnancy miscarriages a couple of orders of magnitude, there's dozens more cases like hers, or this abortion wasn't illegal, there's limits to how far that explanation can go.
I'm less sure about this case than Thurman's, simply because the law was new enough the hospital's legal staff may genuinely have been reviewing it, and I have less information about Barnica's health status. But it's still not a close call on legality, just on moral culpability.
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