Abortion Bans Are Literally Killing Us

SUZANNE CORDEIRO/Getty Images

In the photo that she posted on Facebook, Amber Nicole Thurman looks radiant. Kneeling in the surf, the 28-year-old clutches her now six-year-old son as waves break around them, both wearing matching smiles. It’s the type of photo any mom can relate to.

A year later, Thurman would be dead because of the state of Georgia’s law banning abortion after six weeks of pregnancy. It feels like an almost absurdly cruel irony that this law, which went into effect in 2022 following the overturning of Roe v. Wade, is called the Living Infants and Fairness Equality, or “LIFE” Act.

Thurman’s story is one of two published by ProPublica this week examining the impact of Georgia’s ban on maternal health, and what reporter Kavitha Surana discovered was devastating. She found that the deaths of Thurman and another Georgia woman, Candi Miller, can be directly linked to their inability to access abortion care under the new law.

“There are almost certainly others,” she notes, not just in Georgia but elsewhere where abortion has been restricted.

Both women died in 2022, just weeks or months after the bill passed. Thurman had discovered she was pregnant with twins in July and decided to terminate the pregnancy. However, she had barely missed the opportunity to get an abortion under the new law, as her pregnancy had just passed the six-week mark.

After a few weeks of waiting to see if the law would be overturned, Thurman and a friend traveled to North Carolina to get a legal abortion when she was nine weeks pregnant. At the clinic, which was overrun with other patients from banned abortion states, Thurman was unable to get a surgical abortion and instead was given abortion pills.

Despite following the clinic’s instructions, Thurman began to experience complications like heavy bleeding. She then began to vomit blood. Her boyfriend called an ambulance and Thurman was transported to a hospital.

Medical experts consulted by ProPublica said that should have been clear that Thurman was experiencing a life-threatening complication based on her symptoms. But even after an on-call OB diagnosed her with “acute severe sepsis” due to retained tissue from her abortion, staff did not perform a D&C, the common surgical procedure to remove the septic tissue. Instead, they gave Thurman antibiotics and an IV drip and waited.

Experts quoted by ProPublica said one of the potential outcomes of restrictive abortion bans is it forces medical professionals to decide if a patient’s condition is essentially “bad enough” to warrant intervening and weigh that against the threat of prosecution if they are deemed to do so in error.

By the time medical professionals decided to treat Thurman with a D&C 20 hours after she arrived, it was too late. Thurman died during the surgery. A maternal mortality review committee later determined that if Thurman had been treated earlier, there is a “good chance” she’d still be alive.

Miller’s story, published on Wednesday, while different, has some similar parts. The 41-year-old mother of three also experienced excruciating pain after attempting to have a medication abortion at home in November 2022, and her abortion also did not fully expel all the fetal tissue. In the report, family members told ProPublica that Miller had ordered the pills online because she was afraid to see a doctor or go to a clinic “due to the current legislation on pregnancies and abortions.”

Her family watched her suffer in pain for days before her husband found her unresponsive next to her three-year-old in bed. An autopsy revealed she had not completed the abortion and found a lethal combination of painkillers in her system, but was unable to determine the cause of her death. Her family told the publication Miller had no history of drug use and they are unsure why she took the medication.

A representative for a state committee on maternal health, which reviewed Miller’s case, told ProPublica they determined that her death could have been prevented.

“The fact that she felt that she had to make these decisions, that she didn’t have adequate choices here in Georgia, we felt that definitely influenced her case,” they said. “She’s absolutely responding to this legislation.”

Election 2024

When, at five months pregnant, Emma Giglio discovered her baby had multiple anomalies in utero, she and her husband made the heartrending decision to terminate their pregnancy. But that was just the beginning of her agony.

Two mothers dead, and four children left without them. In the response to the reporting online, amid all of the sorrow and anger there is one emotion missing: surprise. Because this was always going to be the outcome. When you take away necessary medical care from an entire swath of the population, it follows that horrible results will arise.

Many women who survived their harrowing experiences since abortion bans—like Kaitlyn Joshua of Louisiana, Amanda Zurawski of Texas, and Christina Zielke of Ohio among others—have told their stories repeatedly in the media and elsewhere, begging Republican lawmakers to understand that these laws have real consequences for maternal health. Now, those who can’t speak for themselves are having their stories told.

These two women are not anomalies. Unfortunately, this is likely only the tip of the iceberg, and many more women have died who we don’t know of yet. We have just only passed the two-year anniversary of the Dobbs decision, and as ProPublica’s Surana notes, the examination of the consequences have only just begun.

“Committees like the one in Georgia, set up in each state, often operate with a two-year lag behind the cases they examine, meaning that experts are only now beginning to delve into deaths that took place after the Supreme Court overturned the federal right to abortion,” she writes.

As investigators in banned abortion states dive into these investigations, therefore, Thurman and Miller are likely to become just two of many women we have lost. It’s time to share their stories and put a face to what these laws actually mean for women in the US.

Originally Appeared on Glamour