ATLANTA, GA – MAY 21: People hold signs during a protest against recently passed abortion ban bills at the Georgia State Capitol building, on May 21, 2019 in Atlanta, Georgia. The Georgia “heartbeat” bill would ban abortion when a fetal heartbeat is detected. The Alabama abortion law, signed by Gov. Kay Ivey last week, includes no exceptions for cases of rape and incest, outlawing all abortions except when necessary to prevent serious health problems for the woman. Though women are exempt from criminal and civil liability, the new law punishes doctors for performing an abortion, making the procedure a Class A felony punishable by up to 99 years in prison.
Photo: Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images
Amber Nicole Thurman would be alive today if it weren’t for anti-abortion Republicans in Georgia. As ProPublica reported this week, the 28-year-old developed a rare complication in 2022 after receiving a legal medication abortion in another state. Her body had not expelled all the fetal tissue from her uterus, which meant she needed a routine dilation and curettage, or D&C. Her local hospital was well-equipped to perform the procedure. The problem was state law. Georgia had just made it a felony to perform D&Cs “with few exceptions.” Physicians who broke the law “could be prosecuted and face up to a decade in prison,” ProPublica explained.
So Thurman waited twenty hours in total as sepsis, a serious but treatable infection, began to spread through her body. By the time doctors finally began to perform her D&C, she was too ill, and her heart stopped during the procedure. Her dream of attending nursing school would never come to pass. She would never see her young son grow up. Her family and friends could only grieve. A state maternal mortality review committee later concluded that Thurman’s death was preventable, and that there was “a good chance” she would have lived had the hospital had performed a D&C earlier.
Confronted with the circumstances of Thurman’s death, abortion opponents may try to blame the medication she took to end her pregnancy. But that tactic exaggerates the danger posed by abortion-inducing pills. “Out of nearly 6 million women who’ve taken mifepristone in the U.S. since 2000, 32 deaths were reported to the FDA through 2022, regardless of whether the drug played a role,” ProPublica reported. “Of those, 11 patients developed sepsis. Most of the remaining cases involved intentional and accidental drug overdoses, suicide, homicide and ruptured ectopic pregnancies.”
Conservatives should reckon, too, with the death of Candi Miller, a 41-year-old Georgia woman who needed an abortion because doctors had told her another pregnancy would be medically dangerous for her. Miller ordered medication from AidAccess but, like Thurman, her body retained some fetal tissue. She lingered at home, getting sicker and sicker, until her husband found her unresponsive in bed. Her family told ProPublica that she did not visit a doctor “due to the current legislation on pregnancies and abortions.” A state committee of maternal health experts concluded that she did not die because of the medication she’d taken, that her death was also “preventable,” and that she perished as a result of the state’s abortion ban. “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,” a committee member told ProPublica. “She’s absolutely responding to this legislation.”
The deaths of Miller and Thurman are not accidental, but proof that abortion bans work exactly as designed. Their proponents have resisted legislative attempts to widen or create exceptions to save the life of the mother; the result is a legal regime that is profoundly dangerous for pregnant women. Miller and Thurman were also Black women, which meant they were more susceptible to preexisting conditions that make pregnancy more dangerous, and faced extra obstacles as they navigated a medical establishment made even more hostile than usual by anti-abortion legislation. Miller lived with lupus, a condition “three times more common in Black women than white,” ProPublica reported, and both women lived in Georgia, where Black women are three times more likely than white women to die of pregnancy complications.
When abortion bans kill, they reveal their true purpose: to grant a handful of extremists power over the lives and deaths of American women. Women aren’t human beings to these extremists; to them, there is nothing real about female suffering. Women are not flesh but abstractions, and their deaths are remote. What matters, instead, is the fetus – in reality a non-person, a possibility only, but a useful tool by which an extremist may discipline a woman for any infraction imaginable. Abortion opponents will hardly admit this and burrow into rhetoric about human dignity and the sanctity of life. In death, however, we see the truth. The further a woman falls from a far-right ideal of white Christian womanhood, the more severely she must be punished.
Other women have almost certainly died as a result of Georgia’s abortion ban, ProPublica noted. We may yet learn their stories in time. When we do, abortion opponents will not learn from their deaths; any grief they express will be meaningless. Their philosophy isn’t just anti-woman but anti-human. They denied Thurman and Miller the full extent of their humanity, and now both women are dead. Abortion bans don’t save lives, but take them instead.
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