In a climate of politicized panic around ob-gyn care, it is crucial that the truth get out.
After ProPublica published a piece last week on the tragic death of Amber Thurman, the media swiftly blamed pro-life legislation for her death.
“Georgia’s abortion ban killed a young mother. The Christian right now blames the victim.” —Salon
“Georgia’s ‘pro-life’ abortion ban literally killed a woman — and she won’t be the last” —MSNBC
“Georgia Mom, 28, Dies of ‘Preventable’ Infection After Being Denied Life-Saving Procedure Due to State’s Abortion Laws” —People
Even Kamala Harris has amplified this false narrative about Thurman’s tragic death. Abortion access is a hallmark of her campaign and of the campaigns of other Democratic hopefuls across the country. Harris said at a campaign rally in Atlanta last week, “We will speak her name – Amber Nicole Thurman.” Harris said that when the court overturned Roe v. Wade, “we knew this could happen.” “There is a word ‘preventable,’ and there is another word, ‘predictable.’” A sign behind the vice president read, “1 in 3 women lives under a Trump abortion ban.”
While the tendency is morbid, the Left knows that there are political rewards to be gained in loudly blaming pro-life legislation for the preventable deaths of women such as Thurman.
But what actually happened?
Georgia’s LIFE Act was not the cause of Thurman’s death. Rather, a cascading series of causes — ranging from loosened FDA regulations, medical malpractice, and anti-life fearmongering — led to Thurman’s tragic death.
The primary cause of her death was sepsis, a potential side effect of the most common chemical abortifacient — a regimen of mifepristone and misoprostol. Crucially, the FDA has dramatically loosened regulations on the drugs in recent years — regulations that would help keep women safe.
As I wrote earlier this year,
A woman who takes abortion pills late in her pregnancy — anytime after two months — could land in the emergency room for extensive bleeding, sepsis, or worse. The FDA’s own label for abortion pills says that approximately one in 25 women who take the drugs will end up in the emergency room. That likelihood increases with gestational age. Among women who take abortion pills after 84 days of gestation, nearly 40 percent will require follow-up surgery, and 4 percent will sustain significant infection.
[The advice of pro-abortion activists] could place ER doctors in the awful position of having to complete a patient’s botched, self-administered chemical abortion by removing either a still-living fetus from the woman’s womb — an environment made unalterably toxic by the pills — or whatever is left of the dead fetus.
And if you don’t want to take my word for it, even Planned Parenthood has published data revealing that “7–13 percent of women who take chemical abortion pills in this timeframe [at 9–11 weeks’ gestation] are at risk of health complications, likely requiring surgical intervention and follow-up medical care.” Further, the FDA itself noted, in the words of a Fifth Circuit Court decision, that “‘surgical intervention’ was required in 7.9% of the subjects in the American trial of [brand-name mifepristone]. . . . The reasons for surgery included heavy bleeding, infection, incomplete abortion, and ongoing pregnancy — meaning that the embryo or fetus continued to grow and develop.”
When the FDA first approved the use of mifepristone, it stated that the drug could be used only up to seven weeks’ gestational age — for the safety of the woman ingesting it. However, under the Obama administration in 2016, the FDA extended the usage window to ten weeks’ gestational age. In 2021, under Biden, the FDA dropped many other safety protocols for mifepristone — including that the woman have an in-person appointment to verify the gestational age of the fetus and ensure that the pregnancy is non-ectopic.
Amber Thurman took mifepristone (and then misoprostol) at nine weeks’ gestational age — two weeks past the FDA’s original approved gestational age. The drugs become more and more dangerous to the woman the later they are taken in pregnancy, and Thurman’s case is a gut-wrenching example.
Thurman was counseled to take ibuprofen for the pain, and, if there were any serious complications, to go to an emergency room. After taking the first pill at the clinic, she started the drive back home. She could not have known that those pills had the capacity to kill her — a capacity increased by the fact that she was nine weeks pregnant, with twins.
Thurman bled heavily for days while her condition deteriorated. After she vomited blood and passed out at home, her boyfriend called an ambulance. From the moment she entered the hospital, Thurman exhibited signs of an acute internal infection — and yet, doctors allowed her to languish for 20 hours until they began operating. By then, it was too late.
Why did the doctors at the hospital wait so long to treat her?
The actual reasoning of the doctors and nurses involved in Thurman’s case remains unknown. According to the ProPublica article that broke Thurman’s story:
Doctors and a nurse involved in Thurman’s care declined to explain their thinking and did not respond to questions from ProPublica. Communications staff from the hospital did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Georgia’s Department of Public Health, which oversees the state maternal mortality review committee, said it cannot comment on ProPublica’s reporting because the committee’s cases are confidential and protected by federal law.
However, most media outlets have jumped to the conclusion that the doctors and nurses at the hospital that Thurman attended delayed treatment out of fear of prosecution under Georgia’s LIFE Act.
Let us set the record straight. There is no reason, under Georgia’s law, that a doctor should have been afraid to treat Thurman. Pro-abortion groups have fostered terror among doctors and patients alike, furthering the false narrative that they will be prosecuted for administering or receiving lifesaving care under pro-life legislation. Women are afraid to get the care they need — and doctors are afraid to do their jobs — for fear of nonexistent consequences.
First, in order for any procedure to be considered an abortion — and therefore to have the potential to be of legal consideration in states such as Georgia — the fetus must be alive. If a woman is wheeled into a hospital with a deceased fetus — or whatever is left of it — in her womb, no possible procedure that would be used to treat her could be categorized as an “abortion.”
Many media outlets can’t seem to grasp this distinction. ProPublica published a separate story today that collapsed the obvious difference between a remedial dilation and curettage (D&C) procedure and an elective surgical abortion:
To clear the infected tissue, she needed a dilation and curettage, or D&C, a procedure used to empty the uterus for both abortions and routine miscarriage care. Medically speaking, Thurman’s pregnancy had already ended. But the state’s abortion ban had criminalized performing a D&C and threatened doctors with up to 10 years in prison if prosecutors decided they violated it.
No, Georgia has not criminalized the performance of a D&C. That is absurd. Georgia has criminalized — with crucial exceptions — the performance of elective abortions after fetal cardiac activity is detectable (typically around six weeks’ gestational age). A D&C of deceased fetal parts is not an abortion. Every doctor knows this. A D&C is a standard medical practice, most often used in the first trimester if a woman suffers an incomplete miscarriage, to ensure that all fetal remains have been cleared from the womb. The state’s LIFE Act has absolutely no bearing on the practice.
And even if, somehow, the fetus in Thurman’s infected womb had still had a heartbeat, the doctors and nurses attending to her would have been clearly free to perform a D&C on her under Georgia law.
House Bill 481, known as the “Living Infants Fairness and Equality (LIFE) Act,” states:
(b) No abortion is authorized or shall be performed if the probable gestational age of the unborn child has been determined . . . to have a detectable human heartbeat except when:
(1) A physician determines, in reasonable medical judgment, that a medical emergency exists
(2) The probable gestational age of the unborn child is 20 weeks or less and the pregnancy is the result of rape or incest in which an official police report has been filed alleging the offense of rape or incest.
(3) A physician determines, in reasonable medical judgment, that the pregnancy is medically futile
Clearly, Thurman was in the midst of a medical emergency. In short, the doctors in the Atlanta hospital had no reason — under law — to wait 20 hours to perform a D&C, regardless of whether Thurman’s case was caused by a natural miscarriage or an elective abortion.
If the doctors indeed delayed their treatment of Thurman for fear of prosecution (a claim that has no evidence yet), such fear would have been entirely unfounded. Nowhere in this country can a woman be prosecuted for seeking an abortion. And nowhere can a doctor be prosecuted for attending to a patient in good-faith medical judgment.
In a climate of politicized panic around ob-gyn care, it is crucial that the truth get out.