Updated September 18, 2024 at 3:20 p.m. ET
SSome tragedies are impossible to preventor even predicted. The death of Amber Nicole Thurman was not. She was perhaps the first woman to be killed by the repeal of the Roe v. Wade.
In June 2022, the Supreme Court issued its ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson – Women’s Health Organization abolished the constitutional right to abortion, which was roe. Then states went back to their own laws. In Georgia, where Thurman lived, abortions were illegal from the time a “perceptible human heartbeat” was detected – around the sixth week of pregnancy. The law went into effect in late July of that year, the same time Thurman, a 28-year-old physician’s assistant, discovered she was six weeks pregnant with twins.
Thanks to ProPublica, which obtained Thurman’s medical records with her family’s permission, we can see what happened next. She already had a six-year-old son and decided she couldn’t raise any more children. But she couldn’t get an abortion in her home state. So she scheduled a surgical abortion in North Carolina, took a day off work, hired a babysitter, borrowed a relative’s car under false pretenses, and got up at 4 a.m. to drive four hours to the clinic with a friend. But they got caught in traffic, and Thurman missed her appointment. The clinic couldn’t give her another appointment because so many women from other states, also facing strict new laws, were booked that day.
So Thurman was offered abortion pills instead. These are widely available and extremely safe and effective for early pregnancies. However, in less than 5 percent of cases, women need another dose or a procedure called dilation and curettage (D&C) to completely empty the uterus. In countries and states where abortion is legal, this is a simple and routine procedure that carries few risks.
But not in Georgia. At home, Thurman’s bleeding didn’t stop. She went to the hospital at 6:51 p.m. on August 18, and medical tests showed all the classic signs that her abortion was incomplete and that the tissue left inside her was poisoning her blood. But doctors didn’t perform a curettage. They didn’t do one the next morning either, as her condition continued to deteriorate. When she was finally taken to the operating room at 2 p.m., her condition was so bad that doctors began removing her colon and uterus.
But it was too late. Thurman’s heart stopped on the operating table.
Her mother was waiting outside. She had no idea, ProPublica reported, that her daughter’s condition was life-threatening. She didn’t understand why Amber had said to her on the way to the operating room: “Promise me you’ll take care of my son.”
TTwo years after Thurman’s deathGeorgia’s official committee on maternal mortality concluded that this was preventable and that she would have had a “good chance of survival” if she had received a curettage earlier. Former President Donald Trump, who appointed half of Georgia’s six judges, Dobbsrepeatedly claims that “everyone wanted” roe be lifted. But that’s not true. “This young mother should be alive, raising her son and pursuing her dream of attending nursing school,” Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris noted in a statement responding to ProPublica’s investigation.
Thurman’s story plays out in every country where abortion is banned. Women still want abortions, but now they do so in dangerous or unsafe conditions or with inadequate medical supervision. They lie to friends and family about their destination, drive or fly for hours to get treatment, and then return home, possibly bleeding heavily. Having to travel for an abortion increases the risks of the procedure enormously. Until abortion was legalized in Ireland and Northern Ireland in 2018, women went to England in secret. (Many still do, because access remains limited.) Polish women travel to the Netherlands. In El Salvador, where abortion laws are so strict that women can go to prison for natural miscarriages and premature births, the wealthy fly to Miami for abortions. Around the world, women denied access to abortion care are seeking do-it-yourself solutions. ProPublica reported today on a Georgia woman in this situation, Candi Miller, who died after obtaining abortion pills online. The mother of three suffered from an autoimmune disease and other conditions that greatly increased the health risks of pregnancy.
Added to these women are those whose pregnancies fail naturally—and so many do. Laws threatening criminal penalties for abortion doctors have made doctors and hospitals reluctant to perform the urgent procedures that many women who miscarry endure. In Poland, where abortion is illegal in almost all cases, 33-year-old pharmacist Dorota Lalik died in 2023 after a Catholic hospital refused to perform a D&C when her water broke in the fifth month. Instead, she was advised to lie down with her legs elevated. Three days later, she died of sepsis—the same illness that killed Amber Thurman, and the same illness that killed 31-year-old Savita Halappanavar, the woman whose death from sepsis galvanized the campaign to legalize abortion in Ireland. For every death, there are dozens of near-deaths. On the first night of the Democratic National Convention, delegates heard Amanda Zurawski speak, who suffered a miscarriage at 18 weeks after she had already started shopping for baby clothes. Because of new laws in Texas, doctors waited until her temperature began to rise – an urgent sign of infection – before giving her the necessary medication. “Women are bleeding to death in parking lots, being turned away from emergency rooms and losing their ability to ever have children again,” Harris noted in her statement. “Women are dying.”
Unfortunately, the contours of Thurman’s story are as well known as the reactions. First, the law is being denied: Before the law passed in Georgia, prosecutors called the idea that it would cause deaths “overblown scaremongering.” Although the state commission ruled that Thurman’s death was preventable, the Trump campaign has already argued that nothing in Georgia law would prevent an earlier curettage. “President Trump has always supported exceptions for rape, incest and the life of the mother that Georgia law provides,” a spokesperson said. “Given these exceptions, it is unclear why doctors did not act quickly to protect Amber Thurman’s life.”
Arguments like these are naive at best, but usually disingenuous. In Poland, a patient rights ombudsman concluded that Lalik should have been told that her life could have been saved by an abortion – but that was not the case. In Ireland, Sabaratnam Arulkumaran, a medical professor who led the inquiry into Halappanavar’s death, blamed the law. He ruled that doctors would have given Halappanavar the necessary drugs without the (now repealed) Irish amendment that gives equal importance to the life of the mother and that of the fetus. “We would never have heard of her, and she would still be alive today,” he added. The same is true of Thurman’s death.
America is a litigious country, and some of the most extreme anti-abortion laws, such as the so-called bounty law in Texas, explicitly offer private citizens financial rewards if they successfully sue people who help a woman terminate her pregnancy. In this climate, doctors are naturally fearful of legal action. My colleague Sarah Zhang recently reported from Idaho, which has strict abortion laws. She found that some gynecologists are leaving the state because they face an impossible choice: let a woman die or risk their entire careers to treat her. “I couldn’t live with myself if something bad happened to someone,” one doctor told Zhang. “But I also couldn’t live with myself if I went to prison and had to leave my family and young children behind.”
When denial fails, deception comes in: The real problem must be the abortion drugs. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a government blueprint for a second Trump term, calls for additional inspections and regulation of these drugs—far beyond what is usual for similar drugs that have nothing to do with abortion. As an ambitious goal, Project 2025 wants the FDA to revoke its approval of these drugs altogether. (Perhaps Trump has distanced himself from Project 2025 because he senses its unpopularity, but its contributors include many people from his former administration and wider circle.) But Thurman’s story is not about the danger of abortion pills. Hers is about the danger that women will not receive simple, routine aftercare after taking these pills because of government policy decisions.
Leaving abortion laws up to individual states is not enough, as Trump seems to think. America cannot put itself in a situation where women in Georgia have fewer rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness than women in North Carolina. I was raised Catholic, and I understand the deep religious opposition some people have to abortion. But none of those fetuses – not Amber Thurman’s, not Dorota Lalik’s, not Savita Halappanavar’s – could have been saved when the women went to the emergency room. But the three women could have.
Activists keep claiming that abortion is on the ballot in November. In some states, that’s literally true: Activists and lawmakers in nearly a dozen states have proposed constitutional amendments or other measures to protect or restore abortion rights. Trump knows the draconian laws are deeply unpopular in Republican states, hence his labored attempts to find a coherent position on an abortion rights bill proposed in his adopted home state of Florida. His vice presidential running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio, has also abandoned his earlier zeal for abortion restrictions, as the true impact — and unpopularity — of the Dobbs The decision became clear. In January 2022, roe was overturned, Vance said he “would of course like abortion to be illegal nationwide” and also suggested that a “federal response” would be necessary in a hypothetical situation in which “George Soros sends a 747 to Columbus to load up a disproportionate number of black women and get them to have abortions in California.” Now Vance says he’s content to follow Trump’s position — though that depends more on Vance, unlike the rest of us, knowing what it is.
I read the story of Amber Nicole Thurman’s death with a kind of cold anger. This should not have happened. Without Dobbsit wouldn’t have happened. And it will continue to happen. Something went terribly wrong in America when people who call themselves pro-lifers sentenced a little boy to go to bed tonight and every night without his mother.
