Texas has come under heavy scrutiny in recent months over their laws protecting preborn children from abortion, with state legislators accused of putting women’s lives at risk, all because women cannot electively kill their preborn children. Texas laws do allow an abortion if the mother “has a life-threatening physical condition aggravated by, caused by, or arising from a pregnancy that places [her] at risk of death or poses a substantial impairment of a major bodily function unless an abortion is performed.” Yet this is deemed to be cruel and insufficient to safeguard women’s health — so much so that an article in the New Yorker even falsely blamed the state’s laws for the tragic death of a pregnant young woman.
Stephania Taladrid wrote about the death of Yeni Glick, a married immigrant from Mexico who arrived in the United States at the age of three in 1998. In 2021, she married Andrew Glick, an Army Reserve specialist, and within a month, the couple was pregnant — and seemingly thrilled about it.
Unfortunately, the town the couple lived in — Luling — qualifies as a maternity care desert, a place where access to maternity care is limited or altogether absent. Most moms-to-be travel to Kyle, 30 miles away, for routine maternity care. Yet many women resort to delivering in the tiny Luling emergency room, which has only four beds.
READ: ‘Maternity care deserts’ ignored in favor of expanding abortion access
Yeni, who was uninsured, was a frequent visitor to the Luling emergency room, and she was diagnosed with hypertension and diabetes in her 20s. She was also overweight, and caught COVID-19 during the pandemic. Her pregnancy was considered high-risk, and from the beginning, she struggled. She bled early and had problems with breathing. Yet, as noted by Taladrid, no one ever recommended an abortion to her. There also doesn’t appear to be any indication that Glick herself asked for one.
Regardless, Taladrid claimed throughout the length of her article that Glick needed to have her child intentionally killed. Taladrid wrote:
When S.B. 8 banned abortions past the six-week limit, it included an exception in cases of “medical emergency.” At the same time, the law made it tricky for health-care workers to raise the emergency flag, by enabling citizens to initiate lawsuits against people who “aid or abet” banned abortions, incentivizing them with the possibility of a ten-thousand-dollar reward.
A person involved with Yeni’s medical case told me, “One of the things that S.B. 8 does is undermine a sense of common mission and trust, even within a care-giving team—you know, who’s going to go behind your back and sue you because they watched you do your care?”
Glick was struggling with being able to afford her medical care, and even though she tried to get insurance, she was having a hard time getting approved. In her article, Taladrid again pointed to the idea that Glick should have been instructed to abort her child to alleviate the strain pregnancy was placing on her own heart.
Instead, Glick was given medication to help with her high blood pressure, though she allegedly didn’t take it regularly. By 22 weeks and six days, she was again in the Luling emergency room, and she had to be stabilized before being transferred to another hospital in a nearby city. Glick was suspected of having pre-eclampsia, but doctors failed to recommend a delivery then, which would have potentially saved Glick’s life. Her baby was nearly 23 weeks, and could possibly have survived at that point in gestation.
Glick’s records upon arrival to an Austin hospital said she was at “high risk for clinical decompensation/death.”
While in the hospital away from her hometown, Glick improved — yet just four days later, she was discharged. Feeling that she had to keep working with medical bills mounting, Glick chose not to stay home on self-imposed bed rest. Her breathing problems returned, but doctors brushed her off, and she eventually stopped asking for help. By July, she called an ambulance, and was in such bad shape that a transfer by helicopter to the hospital in Kyle was planned.
Tragically, Yeni Glick died by the time the ambulance got her to the Luling emergency room, just two weeks after Roe v. Wade was overturned. After frantically trying to revive her, the doctors then performed an emergency c-section in an effort to save her daughter, Selene, but it was too late. Selene had also died.
Unfortunately, Taladrid’s take on this heartbreaking situation was not that Glick needed and deserved much better medical care, or good maternity care closer to home. Instead, the answer to Glick’s problems, Taladrid insists, was for Selene to be intentionally killed via an abortion.
READ: Maternity care suffers in rural areas while media falsely blames pro-life laws
And yet, she admits: “None of the records from when Yeni was alive acknowledge that, given her multiple underlying conditions, an abortion would have increased her chances of survival.”
Taladrid further spent paragraphs citing medical experts who insisted the best course of action would have been killing baby Selene, although they admitted that Glick should have been carefully monitored until a viable delivery was likely, instead of being discharged into a maternity care desert.
Furthermore, Glick’s mother — quoted at the very end of Taladrid’s long article — said she didn’t think her daughter would have wanted to end her child’s life in an abortion:
Leticia wasn’t as sure, recalling something Yeni said in passing after her improvement in the Austin I.C.U.: that if a doctor had to choose between saving her or saving Selene, her daughter should come first. Leticia had responded, half in jest, “And who exactly is going to take care of Selene?” “Well, you, Mami!” Yeni said.
“Me?” Leticia teased. “If you leave, you better take Selene with you!” Laughing, the women laid the subject to rest, never to discuss it again.
It is no secret that women need access to locally available and better maternity care… but the solution for this is not to intentionally kill their preborn children. Induced abortion has not been found to lower maternal mortality rates, and often even makes it worse. Yeni Glick should have received better medical care; she should not have been discharged from the hospital, and she likely should have been induced when she was almost 23 weeks pregnant and risking pre-eclampsia. Staff could have worked to save both mother and baby.
The answer to Glick’s death is not to exploit her life in an effort to push for abortion, which does nothing to address any of the systemic problems that led to her death.
As Dr. Monique Chireau Wubbenhorst, Assistant Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Duke University Medical Center, testified before a Senate committee, “The solution to maternal mortality — and I’ve been working in this area globally and in the United States for many years — is to improve health care, health education, and to increase support to pregnant women. Abortion does nothing to address any of those issues.”
