Texas

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/21511759

Candace Fails screamed for someone in the Texas hospital to help her pregnant daughter. “Do something,” she pleaded, on the morning of Oct. 29, 2023.

Nevaeh Crain was crying in pain, too weak to walk, blood staining her thighs. Feverish and vomiting the day of her baby shower, the 18-year-old had gone to two different emergency rooms within 12 hours, returning home each time worse than before.

The first hospital diagnosed her with strep throat without investigating her sharp abdominal cramps. At the second, she screened positive for sepsis, a life-threatening and fast-moving reaction to an infection, medical records show. But doctors said her six-month fetus had a heartbeat and that Crain was fine to leave.

Now on Crain’s third hospital visit, an obstetrician insisted on two ultrasounds to “confirm fetal demise,” a nurse wrote, before moving her to intensive care. 

By then, more than two hours after her arrival, Crain’s blood pressure had plummeted and a nurse had noted that her lips were “blue and dusky.” Her organs began failing. 

Hours later, she was dead.

Fails, who would have seen her daughter turn 20 this Friday, still cannot understand why Crain’s emergency was not treated like an emergency. 

But that is what many pregnant women are now facing in states with strict abortion bans, doctors and lawyers have told ProPublica.

A reminder to go vote today if you haven't yet and are eligible to vote.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/21403581

Reporter Yamil Berard scoured through thousands of pages of court records, documents from the National Transportation Safety Board, and videos of that tragic day in February 2021 when 130 cars, trucks and semis piled up along a stretch of the North Tarrant Express. Early morning commuters, unaware of the black ice beneath them, crashed one after another along two lanes bound by concrete barriers on both sides. The horrific scene spanned the length of three football fields.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/21485655

A youth leader at a Texas megachurch has been arrested for allegedly inducing young girls to send him explicit inappropriate images.

Prosecution documents in Abilene, Texas, state that 24-year-old Charles Goff admitted to police that he went on social media and solicited nude photos from girls aged 14 and 15. They also allege that Goff met with a fellow church member and admitted his wrongdoing.

Goff was a youth volunteer at Beltway Park Church, a large baptist megachurch in Abilene in north central Texas with two campuses in the city and a congregation of nearly 5,000 people every week.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/21436202

Josseli Barnica grieved the news as she lay in a Houston hospital bed on Sept. 3, 2021: The sibling she’d dreamt of giving her daughter would not survive this pregnancy.

The fetus was on the verge of coming out, its head pressed against her dilated cervix; she was 17 weeks pregnant and a miscarriage was “in progress,” doctors noted in hospital records. At that point, they should have offered to speed up the delivery or empty her uterus to stave off a deadly infection, more than a dozen medical experts told ProPublica.

But when Barnica’s husband rushed to her side from his job on a construction site, she relayed what she said the medical team had told her: “They had to wait until there was no heartbeat,” he told ProPublica in Spanish. “It would be a crime to give her an abortion.”

For 40 hours, the anguished 28-year-old mother prayed for doctors to help her get home to her daughter; all the while, her uterus remained exposed to bacteria.

Three days after she delivered, Barnica died of an infection.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/4156986

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/4026014

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/21136415

Archived at https://ghostarchive.org/archive/Z2L18

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/21153089

Help make this the year that Texas flips for senate and or for president!

https://colinallred.com/404

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/21081107

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/21020339

No Democrat has won a statewide race in Texas in decades. But conditions are friendlier than ever.

There's a reason no Democrat has accomplished a statewide victory in Texas since 1994.

Pulling off such an upset would require a uniquely talented politician running an almost perfect campaign. That candidate would need to display discipline, calm and poise. Be telegenic and quick on the feet. The candidate would need to be thoroughly Texan and have an identity infused with elements of the state's cultural zeitgeist. The person would need to run in a halfway decent national political environment. And even with all of those boxes checked, that rare Democrat would still need to square off against an extraordinarily disliked Republican running a lackluster campaign without much support from the person's own colleagues.

Enter: Rep. Colin Allred.

Allred's remarkable debate performance Tuesday spawned a flurry of Instagram slides, TikTok videos and X posts. Both in Texas and nationwide, news feeds have been flush this week with clips of the former professional football player **rebuking Sen. Ted Cruz for hiding in a "supply closet" during the attempted insurrection at the U.S. Capitol

a riot by a mob that Cruz himself helped whip up**. Others showed him repeatedly referencing the time Cruz flew to Cancun, Mexico, as hundreds of Texans died during the middle of a winter freeze, or hammering him on his abortion stance

an issue critical to white female voters who have been abandoning the GOP in droves. 

But an impressive debate performance alone is not enough for a Democrat to win a state like Texas. However, polls, fundraising and a changing political climate have all looked promising for Allred. Today, Texas Democrats are in an extraordinary situation, one that has proved elusive over the past three decades: They have an actual chance of winning a statewide race.