How abortion bans killed two women

Last week brought confirmation of what so many feared would happen if Roe v. Wade was overturned: Women have died because of abortion bans.

The 2022 deaths of Georgia mothers Amber Nicole Thurman and Candi Miller, reported in wrenching detail by ProPublica, illustrate the climate of fear created by extreme abortion laws. Thurman died at a hospital of sepsis after doctors apparently delayed treatment until she would have qualified for the state’s medical exception. Miller, too afraid to seek a doctor’s help after a rare complication from a medication abortion, suffered at home until her death. Miller left behind three children; Thurman, a 6-year-old son.

Both deaths were deemed preventable by a state committee of experts in maternal health, according to ProPublica. These committees review patient deaths and can take years to work through cases; that means we’re likely to learn the names of more women who’ve died in the years to come.

Emotions on all sides of the abortion debate are raw. But rather than confront the truth — that abortion bans are causing real harm — anti-abortion activists are choosing to point the finger at doctors, abortion pills and even the women who died. Anywhere but at themselves and their preferred policies.

Some activists appeared genuinely perplexed that medical providers could be uncertain of the legal boundaries in an emergency. Others angrily blamed doctors at Piedmont Henry Hospital, the suburban Atlanta facility where Thurman died. The language of the law is crystal clear, they argue, and medical staff failed Thurman by waiting to perform a D&C.

The medical team does make for an easy target. How could doctors allow Thurman to suffer for 20 hours without providing the simple procedure that would likely have saved her life? But the answer is obvious: performing that simple procedure could cost the doctors their livelihoods and even their freedom.

Twenty-two states have abortion bans made possible by the fall of Roe. In many of these states, doctors must now decide whether a woman has moved so close to the brink of death that she can finally be treated. In Georgia, if they get it wrong, they could spend a decade in jail.

That puts incredible weight on decisions that once were no-brainers — such as whether or not to perform a D&C on a woman who arrives in an ambulance showing signs of septic shock.

And emergency medical teams are often composed of doctors who do not regularly practice reproductive medicine. Their hospital might not have a legal team waiting to provide support. These doctors likely haven’t put a criminal attorney on retainer in case someone later challenges their decision-making.

We don’t know the details of the medical team managing Thurman’s care, but it’s reasonable to think some of those dynamics were at play as the community hospital tried to navigate Georgia’s abortion ban, which at the time was just two weeks old.

“This was an impossible situation for them, and I am sure they carry her death on their heart and it will never leave them,” says Leilah Zahedi-Spung, a maternal-fetal medicine provider in the Denver area. What unfolded in Georgia is why she left her practice in Tennessee after that state’s abortion ban went into effect. “I knew sooner or later, I was going to be in a situation where I was going to lose someone, despite having all of the skills to take care of them.”

Other anti-abortion activists have twisted these tragedies into an opportunity to stoke fears about medication abortion. Thurman and Miller had each used the pills to end a pregnancy. Both suffered from rare complications after not all the fetal tissue was expelled. “The pro-life movement warned of situations like this,” one activist proclaimed on the social media site X.

In particular, anti-abortion activists are using the cases to revive arguments that falsely portrayed medication abortion as dangerous. In reality, the safety and effectiveness of these pills have been proven in study after study, and through their use by millions of women over the past two decades.

The problem is the abortion bans that hamstring providers, prevent follow-up care, and instill terror in women — in Miller’s case, fear that she’d broken the state’s abortion law reportedly caused her to suffer at home rather than seek help from a doctor.

Nevertheless, anti-abortion groups will try to exploit these deaths to create new barriers to accessing the pills, which in 2023 accounted for 63% of abortions performed within the formal health care system in the US.

The pivot by anti-abortion groups to blame everyone and everything but their own policies shouldn’t come as a surprise. It’s the same sort of denial Republicans have repeatedly shown in the wake of school shootings, shifting the blame from gun policy to mentally ill people or lax school security. Their minds and policies have not changed, despite the increasingly long list of children who have died by gun violence in classrooms.

In Ireland, a young woman’s preventable death catalyzed that country to repeal its strict abortion ban. In America, I fear the deaths of Amber Nicole Thurman and Candi Miller may not have the same effect — and won’t be the last.

Lisa Jarvis is a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion.