This is not a drill
Some smarmy former Trump aide over the weekend asked if anyone had evidence of pregnant women actually bleeding out in a parking lot, as alleged since abortion bans took hold across red states. He got inundated with replies, including the TikTok by Carmen Broesder (above) from Idaho. Michelle Goldberg cites a report from ProPublica on a Georgia women who died (Gift article):
It was inevitable, once Roe v. Wade was overturned and states started banning abortion, that women were going to die. Over the last two years, we’ve learned of countless close calls. In Oklahoma, 25-year-old Jaci Statton, sick and bleeding with a nonviable partial molar pregnancy, said medical staff told her to wait in a parking lot until she was “crashing” or on the verge of a heart attack. In Florida, Anya Cook was sent home from the hospital after her membranes ruptured at 16 weeks; she then nearly bled to death in the bathroom of a hair salon. Women in Texas and Louisiana have been denied treatment for life-threatening ectopic pregnancies.
And now ProPublica has identified at least two women who died “after they couldn’t access legal abortions and timely medical care.” According to ProPublica’s Kavitha Surana, “There are almost certainly others.”
On Monday, thanks to Surana, we learned the story of one of those women, Amber Nicole Thurman, an otherwise healthy 28-year-old medical assistant from Georgia with a 6-year-old son. In 2022, Thurman and her child had just moved out of her family’s place and into their own apartment, and she was planning to start nursing school. When she found out she was pregnant with twins, her best friend told ProPublica, she felt she needed an abortion to preserve her newfound stability, but Georgia had enacted a 6-week abortion ban, and she’d just passed the deadline.
Thurman died in what medical authorities in Georgia deemed a “preventable” death. ProPublica promises to tell another woman’s story in coming days.
[Thurman] waited, hoping the law would be put on hold, but eventually she arranged babysitting, took time off from work and borrowed a car in order to get a surgical abortion in North Carolina. Though she and her best friend woke up at 4 a.m. for the drive, they hit terrible traffic on their way there. “The clinic couldn’t hold Thurman’s spot longer than 15 minutes — it was inundated with women from other states where bans had taken effect,” wrote Surana. It offered her a medication abortion instead.
Medication abortion is usually safe and effective, but in about 3 percent to 5 percent of cases, women end up needing either another dose of misoprostol, one of the two drugs in the regimen, or surgery. That’s what happened to Thurman. Days after taking her second pill, she was in pain and bleeding heavily. The clinic in North Carolina would have offered her free follow-up care, but it was too far away.
Eventually, suffering a severe infection, she passed out and ended up in a hospital in suburban Atlanta. She needed a D.&C., a procedure to empty the uterus, but doctors waited 20 hours to operate as her blood pressure sank, and her organs began to fail. According to Surana, Thurman’s last words to her mother were, “Promise me you’ll take care of my son.” A state medical review committee ruled her death “preventable.”
“I suspect that the anti-abortion movement will claim that she was killed by abortion pills and use her case to further its quest to outlaw them,” Goldberg writes, citing Project 2025’s intention of outlawing them.
The bans written by politicians and enacted in multiple states include vague language that leaves physicians and hospitals scratching their heads over when they are legally protected in saving a woman’s life (ProPublica):
Take the language in Georgia’s supposed lifesaving exceptions.
It prohibits doctors from using any instrument “with the purpose of terminating a pregnancy.” While removing fetal tissue is not terminating a pregnancy, medically speaking, the law only specifies it’s not considered an abortion to remove “a dead unborn child” that resulted from a “spontaneous abortion” defined as “naturally occurring” from a miscarriage or a stillbirth.
Thurman had told doctors her miscarriage was not spontaneous — it was the result of taking pills to terminate her pregnancy.
There is also an exception, included in most bans, to allow abortions “necessary in order to prevent the death of the pregnant woman or the substantial and irreversible physical impairment of a major bodily function.” There is no standard protocol for how providers should interpret such language, doctors said. How can they be sure a jury with no medical experience would agree that intervening was “necessary”?
For that matter, how could politicians with no medical experience craft a bill that would make “necessary” clear? They might as well write legislation defining when a nuclear launch is necessary.
Goldberg concludes:
The complications Thurman faced didn’t have to be deadly; a timely medical intervention could have saved her life. And as long as abortion bans persist, more women are likely to die the same way. Some probably already have. As Surana notes, state committees tasked with reviewing maternal mortality typically operate with a two-year lag, so experts are only just beginning to delve into the details of pregnancy-related deaths that have happened since Roe was overturned.
But we’ll have to wait to find out longer than the delay that killed Amber Nicole Thurman.
It’s National Voter Registration Day. Make the most of it. Make more of Nov. 5. Women’s lives depend on it.