Nevaeh Crain would have turned 20 on Friday. Instead, she is another American killed by a Republican abortion ban.

After reporting on Amber Nicole Thurman and Candi Miller, who died due to a ban in Georgia enacted after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned themRoe v. Wade in 2022, ProPublica turned to Texas and told the stories of Josseli Barnica and Crain, who died last year at age 18 after suffering complications from sepsis, the miscarriage of a daughter she planned to name Lillian, and delayed medical care.

“On the morning of her baby shower, October 28, 2023, Crain woke up with a headache.” ProPublica reported on Friday. She soon vomited with a fever and sought treatment at two hospitals in Texas a total of three times within 20 hours. The outlet continues: “On her third trip, a doctor insisted on two ultrasounds to confirm fetal death before transferring her to the intensive care unit. Hours later, Crain died.”

As journalists Lizzie Presser and Kavitha Surana explained:

ProPublica condensed more than 800 pages of Crain's medical records into a four-page timeline in consultation with two maternal-fetal medicine specialists; Reporters discussed it with nine doctors, including researchers at prestigious universities, gynecologists who regularly treat miscarriages, and experts in emergency medicine and maternal health.

Some said the initial emergency room missed warning signs of infection that deserved attention. Everyone said the doctor at the second hospital never should have sent Crain home if her signs of sepsis hadn't improved. And when she came back for the third time, everyone said there was no medical reason to make her wait two ultrasounds before taking aggressive measures to save herself.

“That’s how these restrictions are killing women,” Dr. Dara Kass, a former regional director of the Department of Health and an emergency physician in New York. “It’s never just a decision, it’s never just a doctor, it’s never just a nurse.”

Crain and her mother, Candace Fails, “believed abortion was morally wrong,” it says ProPublica. “The teenager could only support it in the context of rape or a life-threatening illness, she always told her mother. They didn’t care if the government banned it, only how their Christian faith guided their own actions.”

Fails told reporters that she still believed doctors had an obligation to do everything they could to save Crain, even if it meant losing the pregnancy, but they seemed more worried about that to make the fetal heartbeat. “I know it sounds selfish, and God knows I'd rather have both, but if I had to choose,” she said, “I would have chosen my daughter.”

Although a federal law, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA), requires emergency rooms that accept Medicare to provide patients with “necessary stabilizing care,” which the Biden-Harris administration says includes abortions, The Associated Pressannounced in August that more than 100 patients nationwide “have been turned away or treated negligently since 2022.”

Republican officials in several states, including Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, have fought the Biden-Harris administration's interpretation of EMLATA, and last month the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review a lower court decision banning emergency abortions, that violate Texas law.

ProPublicaCoverage of Crain's death comes during early voting for the Nov. 5 election. American voters will choose the next president — former Republican President Donald Trump or Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris — and which party controls each chamber of Congress.

Democrats have pushed hard for reproductive freedom, emphasizing that Trump appointed three of the justices behind 2022 Dobbs vs. Jackson Women's Health Organization He made a decision that ended abortion rights nationwide, and he plans to vote against a ballot measure in Florida that would ban pre-viability abortions in the state, where a six-week restriction is now in effect. In September, Harris, a former U.S. senator, endorsed eliminating the filibuster for codification roe.