On Election Day, KFDM 6 News in Beaumont, Texas, published an article featuring remarks from the parents of Nevaeh Crain, a young woman who died last year along with her preborn baby, due to sepsis that was not properly diagnosed and treated in time.
Crain’s parents had originally spoken with ProPublica, a liberal news outlet that has admitted to searching for deaths of women in pro-life states in an effort to blame their respective pro-life laws. Doctors have weighed in, claiming that this case, and others covered by ProPublica, are examples of medical negligence that can and do happen in states, regardless of their laws regarding abortion.
However, Crain’s parents, Robert and Candace Fails, told the local news station that their daughter’s tragic story is being used to paint an inaccurate political narrative. KFDM reported:
… the family says Nevaeh’s death is being used for politics when they say hospitals are to blame.
“I want them to be going after Baptist and Saint Elizabeth because they’re to blame for her death,” said Fails.
The hospitals Crain visited in the last 24 hours of her life both failed to treat her properly. According to KFDM, which appears largely consistent with ProPublica’s report (emphases added):
The day of her baby shower, Nevaeh woke ip with a headache, which led to nausea, fever, shivering and stomach pain. Her parents say she spent four hours in the lobby at Baptist Hospital throwing up and her baby was not evaluated despite complaints of stomach pain.
“They said they had swabbed her throat,” said Fails. “She had strep, they sent her home with some antibiotics.”
Nevaeh returned home, but around 3AM she woke her mother up, complaining of worsening stomach pain and a hard stomach. This time, the family went to CHRISTUS Saint Elizabeth.
“It was probably… around three or four hours she was in there and they said the baby’s heart rate was good and strong,” said Fails. “They said they were going to discharge her even though she had high fever, infection, her blood pressure was still high.”
As Live Action News noted in an analysis of ProPublica’s article, at Christus Southeast St. Elizabeth, Crain’s physician, OB hospitalist Dr. William Hawkins, was the first to diagnose her with a urinary tract infection. She also screened positive for signs of sepsis. Yet he reportedly discharged her when she was too weak to even walk. Hawkins is alleged to have overlooked infections in patients before.
OBGYN Dr. Christina Francis, CEO of the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists, noted in a recent Facebook video that Crain’s symptoms were “all things that would raise very big red flags, for those of us who are OB/GYNs, in a pregnant patient.” She added:
You don’t treat a temperature of 102.8 in a pregnant woman the same way you treat it in a non-pregnant patient. We take those fevers much more seriously…. She even screened positive for sepsis…. From my read of this, it sounds like her uterus wasn’t the source of her infection, but most likely this urinary tract infection.
When Crain returned to Christus St. Elizabeth again just hours later, she saw on-duty OB/GYN Dr. Marcelo Totorica, who inexplicably delayed her care and simply continued to administer antibiotics though he was no longer able to detect Crain’s baby’s heartbeat. Regardless, there was no need to wait to even confirm the presence of a heartbeat; in an emergency like this, the standard of care would have been an emergency delivery. Crain was about six months pregnant.
Dr. Ingrid Skop, a Texas OB/GYN and VP of Medical Affairs for the Charlotte Lozier Institute, told Live Action News that ProPublica’s decision to blame Crain’s death on Texas’ pro-life law “shows ProPublica’s ideological motivation,” reiterating that “During a pregnancy emergency, Texas law states physicians may use their ‘reasonable medical judgment’ to determine when to intervene, and the risk of maternal death does not need to be ‘imminent.’… Texas medical organizations and hospitals need to do better to make sure that every physician understands their duty to provide lifesaving care.”
It appears that Crain’s parents agree with Skop: the pro-life law in Texas isn’t what killed their daughter and granddaughter.
In fact, 23% of hospital maternal deaths are reportedly related to sepsis. The CDC notes that sepsis can progress incredibly rapidly, writing, “More than 1.7 million Americans get sepsis each year, and about 350,000 people in the United States die from sepsis annually… Sepsis can develop quickly from initial infection and progress to septic shock in as little as 12 to 24 hours.”
Crain was seen at 4:20 am by Hawkins, and screened positive then for clinical signs of sepsis. By 11:20 pm, Crain was back in the same hospital with a different doctor who also apparently failed to provide her with timely care. As Live Action News previously noted, “Seven hours had passed since she first showed signs of sepsis, with, reportedly, no aggressive interventions whatsoever.” However, that doesn’t even count the four hours she spent vomiting in the lobby of Baptist Hospital (and not being evaluated by obstetrics), or the morning she spent with headache, nausea, fever, and shivering during her baby shower. Given all of this, it seems quite likely that actual signs of sepsis were present for longer that seven hours.
KDFM notes, “Nevaeh visited the emergency room three times over a period of 20 hours before being admitted to CHRISTUS and never made it out of the hospital” (emphasis added).
If more than 1 in 5 hospital maternal deaths is due to sepsis, it is dangerously common. And yet, leading medical groups have chosen not to provide guidance to member physicians on how to navigate any obstetric medical emergencies with regard to the pro-life laws in Texas (or in any other state, for that matter). Dr. Skop noted in the Facebook video with Dr. Francis:
Doctors are not attorneys. We have always relied on our professional medical associations to explain new laws that impact the practice of medicine, and this happens commonly. The Affordable Care Act, the HIPAA privacy regulations, even the opioid prescribing changes… do have also significant punishments involved. So this is not the first time that doctors have seen a significant concern from the law that they need to obey the law.
But every time what has happened is our medical organizations have explained the law to us. In fact, nearly every year, I am required to take mandatory CME [continuing medical education] to make sure I still remember how to prescribe opioids. So this is how it works in medicine.
But this time it did not work this way. None of the medical organizations voluntarily helped the doctors understand the law, and in fact, sometimes they were stirring up the confusion and fear themselves… and then when doctors did become confused and provide sub-quality care… then that’s being pointed at as demonstration that the laws are confusing….
Despite this, Skop added “Most doctors do understand. The law is not confusing.” She added that “To date since 2022, there have been 119” abortions performed for life of the mother in Texas, yet no physician has been prosecuted for an abortion.
According to KDFM, “The family of [Crain] blames the death of their daughter and her unborn baby on what they call ‘medical negligence’ on the part of” the two hospitals. Crain’s mother feels that they “murdered” her daughter and granddaughter and “just got away with it.” The family is reportedly having difficulty finding an attorney, saying “they’ve been told it’s impossible to sue the emergency rooms involved.”
