Is It Better to Let Women Die from Abortion Pills Than to Tell Them the Truth?

I wrote Monday about the effort to blame Georgia’s “heartbeat bill” abortion ban for the case of Amber Nicole Thurman, a healthy 28-year-old woman who sought an abortion for no reason of medical need, took the abortion pill, suffered life-threatening complications, and died when a hospital delayed in performing a routine procedure that is completely legal under Georgia’s abortion law. Senator Ron Wyden (D., Ore.) even held a hearing of the Senate Finance Committee Tuesday morning to promote the misleading claim that Thurman was killed by Georgia law, rather than by the abortion pill and the malpractice of the hospital that failed timely to treat her.

Pro-abortion ProPublica journalist Kavitha Surana has also highlighted a second case: that of Candi Miller. Miller’s case illustrates even more clearly the costs of the Biden-Harris policy of permitting an unregulated, unsupervised abortion pill to be sold through the mail — as well as the costs of Democratic rhetoric that misleads women into believing that they cannot receive medical treatment after its use.

Abortion by Mail

Miller, unlike Thurman, was 41 years old, married, and had genuine health problems (lupus, diabetes, hypertension, a history of problem pregnancies) that should have made her genuinely concerned about getting pregnant. That doesn’t mean she could not have a healthy pregnancy and a healthy child, but it was a risk. She got pregnant anyway.

Surana concedes that, “with support, some patients” with Miller’s conditions “can remain stable and have healthy pregnancies, though the experience can be physically taxing and painful.” Had the pregnancy proven a grave threat to her health, Miller may eventually have qualified for an abortion under Georgia law. If we take seriously the moral gravity of abortion, that’s not so different from how justifiable homicide works in general. You’re allowed to shoot an armed intruder inside your home. You’re not allowed to gun down a dangerous person for walking by your front door. The law in many areas recognizes a difference between potential threats — even possibly grave ones — and actual, imminent threats.

What Miller did next was to order an abortion pill online from a company in the Netherlands, Aid Access, that could not possibly provide her with follow-up care if she had complications. This was illegal. The Biden-Harris administration allows Aid Access to operate in flagrant violation of federal law.

The Comstock Act, signed by President Ulysses S. Grant in 1873 when he had a moment free from fighting the Klan, prohibits sending abortion drugs or devices through the U.S. Mail. Whatever the federal government lacks in constitutional power on the subject of abortion, it still controls the mails. The narrow Biden administration reading of the Comstock Act, adopted by those who seek to nullify it, is that it’s only applicable when the mailer intends to send the drug to someone who intends to use it illegally. But, as Surana admits, that’s Aid Access’s business model: “The organization, based in the Netherlands, is devoted to expanding abortion access to places where it is not legal. Patients contact a doctor in Europe who sends them pills from a supplier in India. According to one researcher, Aid Access serves about 7,000 patients a month in the U.S., nearly 90% of them in states with abortion bans or severe restrictions.”

Seven thousand a month. That’s 84,000 American children killed every year by a foreign company openly breaking American law, with the approval of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. It’s the death toll of 9/11 times 28, every year. Biden and Harris could stop that with one phone call, yet they prefer to let it go on.

It can have deadly consequences to mothers even where there are no legal barriers to abortion. A Nevada woman, Alyona Dixon, died of sepsis after taking the abortion pill in 2022 after it was given her by Planned Parenthood. Her family has filed a wrongful death suit. Don’t hold your breath waiting for Kamala Harris to say her name; she’s not useful.

According to Surana’s account, Miller faced the same problem as Thurman: The abortion pill left her with dead fetal tissue that would turn septic and kill her if untreated. It appears that what killed Miller wasn’t the sepsis but the painkillers she applied without medical supervision, a cocktail of fentanyl, Benadryl, and Tylenol. Had the original FDA regulations repealed by the Obama and Biden-Harris administrations been in force, Miller would have seen a doctor and not been self-medicating. Instead, she died.

Why? Surana says “it was significant to the state maternal mortality review committee that Miller did not feel she could seek medical care,” and she quotes her son saying she believed that she could face jail time for an abortion. At this point, one must ask: Who made her believe that? Surana strains to blame a single statement by a Douglas County, Ga., district attorney — a statement widely publicized by left-leaning media. In reality, the vast bulk of messages about women facing prosecution for abortion (which Georgia law does not provide for) have come from the pro-abortion side. Are they happy with what they accomplished?

Thurman’s case is similar: Surana reports that “Thurman wanted a surgical abortion close to home and held out hope as advocates tried to get the ban paused in court.” Who encouraged her in the belief that litigation would have that result? As Kayla Bartsch has detailed, even data from the FDA and Planned Parenthood show that the abortion pill’s risk of complications for the mother rise sharply the longer into her pregnancy she waits to take it.

You or I might think that the risk that women would be misinformed to the extent that they forego medical treatment and die would be an argument for turning down the rhetorical heat and the disinformation about what the law does. But that’s not how Kamala Harris, or Kavitha Surana, or Michelle Goldberg wants things to go. Indeed, Surana’s editor at ProPublica has admitted that they have been looking to write a story like this one ever since Dobbs was decided two years ago. Women such as Thurman and Miller are more useful to them dead.

Selective Privacy

Finally, we can’t let this story go by without noting the flagrantly hypocritical posture of the Biden-Harris administration regarding the enforcement of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). Earlier this year, Dr. Eithan Haim was indicted by the Biden Justice Department for revealing — through journalist Chrisopher Rufo — that Texas Children’s Hospital was continuing to perform transgender medical procedures on underage children in spite of its public denials. The charges faced by Dr. Haim for acting as a public whistleblower could amount to as much as ten years in prison and up to $250,000 in fines.

Dr. Haim was charged with having accessed and caused the publication of “individually identifiable health information” of the hospital’s patients, notwithstanding that he redacted from anything he passed on to Rufo any individually identifiable information. As Ed Whelan has observed:

HIPAA defines the term “individually identifiable health information” to be limited to information that (among other things) “identifies the individual” or “with respect to which there is a reasonable basis to believe that the information can be used to identify the individual.”. . . Haim entirely (not “partially”) redacted the names of the patients, and there is no reasonable basis to believe that the remaining information could be used to identify the patients.

By contrast, the maternal mortality review information that Surana has obtained and published is highly particular and personal to Thurman and Miller, and has literally resulted in the vice president of the United States leading chants of Thurman’s name at rallies. Will Merrick Garland track down and prosecute Surana’s sources? If you think there’s even a remote chance of that happening, you have more faith in the evenhanded integrity of the Justice Department under Biden and Harris than experience would warrant.