Bulletins and News Discussion from November 25th to December 1st, 2024 - Brothers in Genocide - COTW: Morocco

At Methodist, the emergency room doctor reached Davis, the on-call OB-GYN, to discuss the ultrasound, according to records. They agreed on a plan of “observation in the hospital to monitor bleeding.”

Around 8:30 p.m., just after Hope arrived, Porsha passed out. Terrified, he took her head in his hands and tried to bring her back to consciousness. “Babe, look at me,” he told her. “Focus.” Her blood pressure was dipping dangerously low. She had held off on accepting a blood transfusion until he got there. Now, as she came to, she agreed to receive one and then another.

By this point, it was clear that she needed a D&C, more than a dozen OB-GYNs who reviewed her case told ProPublica. She was hemorrhaging, and the standard of care is to vacuum out the residual tissue so the uterus can clamp down, physicians told ProPublica.

“Complete the miscarriage and the bleeding will stop,” said Dr. Lauren Thaxton, an OB-GYN who recently left Texas.

“At every point, it’s kind of shocking,” said Dr. Daniel Grossman, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of California, San Francisco who reviewed Porsha’s case. “She is having significant blood loss and the physician didn’t move toward aspiration.”

All Porsha talked about was her devastation of losing the pregnancy. She was cold, crying and in extreme pain. She wanted to be at home with her boys. Unsure what to say, Hope leaned his chest over the cot, passing his body heat to her.

At 9:45 p.m., Esmeralda Acosta, a nurse, wrote that Porsha was “continuing to pass large clots the size of grapefruit.” Fifteen minutes later, when the nurse learned Davis planned to send Porsha to a floor with fewer nurses, she “voiced concern” that he wanted to take her out of the emergency room, given her condition, according to medical records.

At 10:20 p.m., seven hours after Porsha arrived, Davis came to see her. Hope remembered what his mother had told him on the phone earlier that night: “She needs a D&C.” The doctor seemed confident about a different approach: misoprostol. If that didn’t work, Hope remembers him saying, they would move on to the procedure.

A pill sounded good to Porsha because the idea of surgery scared her. Davis did not explain that a D&C involved no incisions, just suction, according to Hope, or tell them that it would stop the bleeding faster. The Ngumezis followed his recommendation without question. “I’m thinking, ‘He’s the OB, he’s probably seen this a thousand times, he probably knows what’s right,’” Hope said.

But more than a dozen doctors who reviewed Porsha’s case were concerned by this recommendation. Many said it was dangerous to give misoprostol to a woman who’s bleeding heavily, especially one with a blood clotting disorder. “That’s not what you do,” said Dr. Elliott Main, the former medical director for the California Maternal Quality Care Collaborative and an expert in hemorrhage, after reviewing the case. “She needed to go to the operating room.” Main and others said doctors are obliged to counsel patients on the risks and benefits of all their options, including a D&C.

Performing a D&C, though, attracts more attention from colleagues, creating a higher barrier in a state where abortion is illegal, explained Goulding, the OB-GYN in Houston. Staff are familiar with misoprostol because it’s used for labor, and it only requires a doctor and a nurse to administer it. To do a procedure, on the other hand, a doctor would need to find an operating room, an anesthesiologist and a nursing team. “You have to convince everyone that it is legal and won’t put them at risk,” said Goulding. “Many people may be afraid and misinformed and refuse to participate — even if it’s for a miscarriage.”

Davis moved Porsha to a less-intensive unit, according to records. Hope wondered why they were leaving the emergency room if the nurse seemed so worried. But instead of pushing back, he rubbed Porsha’s arms, trying to comfort her. The hospital was reputable. “Since we were at Methodist, I felt I could trust the doctors.”

On their way to the other ward, Porsha complained of chest pain. She kept remarking on it when they got to the new room. From this point forward, there are no nurse’s notes recording how much she continued to bleed. “My wife says she doesn’t feel right, and last time she said that, she passed out,” Hope told a nurse. Furious, he tried to hold it together so as not to alarm Porsha. “We need to see the doctor,” he insisted.

Her vital signs looked fine. But many physicians told ProPublica that when healthy pregnant patients are hemorrhaging, their bodies can compensate for a long time, until they crash. Any sign of distress, such as chest pain, could be a red flag; the symptom warranted investigation with tests, like an electrocardiogram or X-ray, experts said. To them, Porsha’s case underscored how important it is that doctors be able to intervene before there are signs of a life-threatening emergency.

But Davis didn’t order any tests, according to records.

Around 1:30 a.m., Hope was sitting by Porsha’s bed, his hands on her chest, telling her, “We are going to figure this out.” They were talking about what she might like for breakfast when she began gasping for air.

“Help, I need help!” he shouted to the nurses through the intercom. “She can’t breathe.”

Hours later, Hope returned home in a daze. “Is mommy still at the hospital?” one of his sons asked. Hope nodded; he couldn’t find the words to tell the boys they’d lost their mother. He dressed them and drove them to school, like the previous day had been a bad dream. He reached for his phone to call Porsha, as he did every morning that he dropped the kids off. But then he remembered that he couldn’t.

Friends kept reaching out. Most of his family’s network worked in medicine, and after they said how sorry they were, one after another repeated the same message. All she needed was a D&C, said one. They shouldn’t have given her that medication, said another. It’s a simple procedure, the callers continued. We do this all the time in Nigeria.

Since Porsha died, several families in Texas have spoken publicly about similar circumstances. This May, when Ryan Hamilton’s wife was bleeding while miscarrying at 13 weeks, the first doctor they saw at Surepoint Emergency Center Stephenville noted no fetal cardiac activity and ordered misoprostol, according to medical records. When they returned because the bleeding got worse, an emergency doctor on call, Kyle Demler, said he couldn’t do anything considering “the current stance” in Texas, according to Hamilton, who recorded his recollection of the conversation shortly after speaking with Demler. (Neither Surepoint Emergency Center Stephenville nor Demler responded to several requests for comment.)

They drove an hour to another hospital asking for a D&C to stop the bleeding, but there, too, the physician would only prescribe misoprostol, medical records indicate. Back home, Hamilton’s wife continued bleeding until he found her passed out on the bathroom floor. “You don’t think it can really happen like that,” said Hamilton. “It feels like you’re living in some sort of movie, it’s so unbelievable.”

Across Texas, physicians say they blame the law for interfering with medical care. After ProPublica reported last month on two women who died after delays in miscarriage care, 111 OB-GYNs sent a letter to Texas policymakers, saying that “the law does not allow Texas women to get the lifesaving care they need.”

Dr. Austin Dennard, an OB-GYN in Dallas, told ProPublica that if one person on a medical team doubts the doctor’s choice to proceed with a D&C, the physician might back down. “You constantly feel like you have someone looking over your shoulder in a punitive, vigilante type of way.”

The criminal penalties are so chilling that even women with diagnoses included in the law’s exceptions are facing delays and denials. Last year, for example, legislators added an update to the ban for patients diagnosed with previable premature rupture of membranes, in which a patient’s water breaks before a fetus can survive. Doctors can still face prosecution for providing abortions in those cases, but they are offered the chance to justify themselves with what’s called an “affirmative defense,” not unlike a murder suspect arguing self defense. This modest change has not stopped some doctors from transferring those patients instead of treating them; Dr. Allison Gilbert, an OB-GYN in Dallas, said doctors send them to her from other hospitals. “They didn’t feel like other staff members would be comfortable proceeding with the abortion,” she said. “It’s frustrating that places still feel like they can’t act on some of these cases that are clearly emergencies.” Women denied treatment for ectopic pregnancies, another exception in the law, have filed federal complaints.

In response to ProPublica’s questions about Houston Methodist’s guidance on miscarriage management, a spokesperson, Gale Smith, said that the hospital has an ethics committee, which can usually respond within hours to help physicians and patients make “appropriate decisions” in compliance with state laws.

After Porsha died, Davis described in the medical record a patient who looked stable: He was tracking her vital signs, her bleeding was “mild” and she was “said not to be in distress.” He ordered bloodwork “to ensure patient wasn’t having concerning bleeding.” Medical experts who reviewed Porsha’s case couldn’t understand why Davis noted that a nurse and other providers reported “decreasing bleeding” in the emergency department when the record indicated otherwise. “He doesn’t document the heavy bleeding that the nurse clearly documented, including the significant bleeding that prompted the blood transfusion, which is surprising,” Grossman, the UCSF professor, said.

Patients who are miscarrying still don’t know what to expect from Houston Methodist.

We're going to be thoughts and prayering stuff like this within 4 years

It would be irrational to ask nearly powerless people to resist, yet I REALLY want to start seeing the people enforcing abortion bans suffering consequences.

Amber.