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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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