28-Year-Old Single Mother Died Because of Georgia’s Abortion Ban 

In 2022, after Georgia's six-week abortion ban went into effect, a Black woman named Amber Nicole Thurman died a “preventable death” after being denied an emergency abortion procedure, according to a new report from ProPublica. 

By Kylie Cheung  |  September 16, 2024 | 3:45pm
Photo: Facebook/ProPublica AbortionPolitics Abortion
28-Year-Old Single Mother Died Because of Georgia’s Abortion Ban 

Just over two years after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Georgia’s maternal mortality committee has identified the first preventable abortion ban-related death, which happened right after the state’s near-total ban took effect. In a harrowing report published Monday, ProPublica detailed the woman’s story and wrote that at least one other maternal death was reviewed by the same state committee and determined to have resulted from Georgia’s ban. The outlet says it will publish a separate report on this death. 

In 2022, Atlanta resident Amber Nicole Thurman learned she was pregnant days after Georgia’s abortion ban took effect in July. Thurman, 28, was a single mother to a six-year-old son, who had just moved out of her family’s home and was about to enroll in nursing school. ProPublica writes: 

When she learned she was pregnant with twins in the summer of 2022, she quickly decided she needed to preserve her newfound stability, her best friend, Ricaria Baker, told ProPublica.

But her pregnancy passed the six-week mark just days after Georgia’s six-week ban went into effect on July 20. Thurman waited a few weeks, hopeful the ban would be paused in court, but finally scheduled an appointment in North Carolina by her ninth week. 

As a result of heavy traffic, she missed her appointment at the North Carolina clinic for a procedural abortion. (The clinic was slammed with patients from other states with bans.) Because Thurman had been forced to miss work, find child care, and struggle to get access to a car, rescheduling the appointment wasn’t an option, so she accepted the clinic’s offer of abortion pills. Complications from abortion pills, which are highly safe, are exceedingly rare. But they do happen. Typically, any complications are easily treated by readily available in-clinic abortion procedures—but abortion bans have changed that.

Several days after initiating the medication abortion, Thurman vomited blood and fainted in her home. She was taken to the hospital in an ambulance, where a series of tests revealed remaining tissue in her uterus and that she had developed sepsis, a life-threatening infection that’s among the leading causes of maternal death. Thurman needed a simple abortion procedure known as a dilation and curettage, or D&C, to save her life, but Georgia’s ban had just made it a felony punishable with a decade in prison.

It took 20 hours before doctors decided her condition was life-threatening enough to operate and avoid prison time, but it was too late: Her heart stopped as they performed the operation.

“This young woman in Georgia should have received the care she needed and deserved, without delay,” Dr. Jamila Perritt, an OBGYN and president of Physicians for Reproductive Health, told Jezebel. “This tragedy is a stark reminder that as these legal restrictions continue to spread across the country, we will continue seeing devastating consequences, including more preventable deaths, changes in our health care landscape, and widening health inequities.” Perritt stressed that “complications following procedural or medication abortion are extremely rare,” and should they occur, it’s “critical that medical providers work to urgently ensure that all patients receive the timely, compassionate care they deserve, without fear of criminalization.”

Georgia’s abortion ban offers a narrow, ambiguous exception to save the pregnant person’s life—but facing the threat of prison, doctors in all states with similar bans have become increasingly conservative about providing life-saving abortion care. As medical experts have long stressed, these exceptions fail to consider the urgent, fast-paced reality of pregnancy-related complications. Outside of Georgia, several states have faced lawsuits to clarify their emergency exceptions. In May, the Texas Supreme Court outright dismissed one lawsuit brought forth by over 20 women, while other cases remain ongoing.

“They would feel the need to wait for a higher blood pressure, wait for a higher fever—really got to justify this one—bleed a little bit more,” Dr. Melissa Kottke, an OB-GYN at Emory, warned Georgia lawmakers in 2019 when they first passed the six-week ban. (The ban couldn’t take effect until the overturn of Roe.) 

This appears to be what happened to Thurman. ProPublica reports that the Georgia maternal mortality committee “recently” deemed Thurman’s a “preventable death,” concluding there’s a “good chance” Thurman would have been fine if the hospital provided the D&C earlier. Thurman’s identity as a Black woman is also an inextricable piece of her tragic death. Georgia has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the nation and Black patients in the state are three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related complications than white patients. Within a year of the Roe decision in 1973, the legal availability of D&C procedures reduced the rate of maternal deaths for women of color, specifically, by 40%.

Just last week, the research organization ANSIRH (Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health) of the University of California, San Francisco published a study of dozens of horrific anecdotes from physicians about how abortion bans have impacted their ability to provide standard medical care, collected between September 2022 and this August. Patients of color, who are more likely to receive substandard medical care across the board, were disproportionately represented.

Most state committees are only now beginning to work on maternal deaths that took place after Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health—which is why Georgia’s maternal mortality review’s findings arrive two years after Thurman’s death. As ProPublica’s report stresses, across all states, these committees operate on a two-year lag.

Thurman’s is the first case of a committee concluding a maternal death was preventable and related to an abortion ban. Her family members say that, due to lack of transparency from the hospital, they’ve been told for the last two years that Thurman died of “septic shock” and “retained products of conception.” They only learned from ProPublica’s report—not state officials or the hospital—that her death was deemed preventable.

In July 2022, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) said he was “overjoyed” his ban would take effect and claimed the state would keep women “safe, healthy, and informed.” A spokesperson for the governor’s office told ProPublica last week that their reporting on Thurman’s death amounted to a “fear-mongering campaign.” This is similar to a comment from attorneys for Georgia back in 2022, calling medical expert’s warnings about the dangers of abortion bans “hyperbolic fear mongering.”

Two weeks after that comment, Thurman would be dead, her then-six-year-old son left without a mother.

 
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