Vice President Kamala Harris spoke in Georgia on Friday afternoon about abortion rights amid the news that broke this week of two young women who died following taking abortion pills within six months of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.
Claim: Two women died because of the state’s abortion ban
THE CLAIM: “Now we know that at least two women–and those are only the stories we know–here in the state of Georgia, died because of a Trump abortion ban,” said Harris, referring to the various gestational age restrictions or prohibitions of abortions passed by state legislatures following Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision in June 2022.
Harris was referring to stories published this week by ProPublica reporting that two women, Amber Nicole Thurman, 28, and Candi Miller, 41, died in the state following the Dobbs decision after taking abortion pills, and suggesting that the abortion measure was to blame.
Harris only spoke by name about Thurman, the single mother of a six-year-old boy and an aspiring nursing student, who died of a sepsis infection following complications from taking abortion drugs in August 2022.
“But you see,” said Harris in her speech on Friday, “under the Trump abortion ban, her doctors faced up to a decade in prison for providing Amber the care she needed.”
THE FACTS: The two women died after seeking chemical abortions, but there is no evidence that the state’s abortion ban is to blame for Thurman’s death or that her doctors faced penalties for treating her.
Georgia in 2019 had passed a banning abortion after six weeks gestation, approximately when fetal cardiac activity can be detected via ultrasound, a measure intended to take immediate effect when Roe was overturned.
But Thurman was approximately nine weeks pregnant with twins when she traveled to a North Carolina abortion clinic, where she was given mifepristone and misoprostol to take at home.
Five days after taking the abortion agent misoprostol, which induces contractions to expel the pregnancy tissue, Thurman presented at the emergency room on a stretcher with heavy bleeding, vomiting, foul-smelling vaginal discharge, critically elevated white blood cell count, and dropping blood pressure.
Thurman waited three hours before being administered antibiotics and more than 20 hours to receive a dilation and curettage, also known as a D&C, which involves dilating the patient’s cervix and surgically removing the remaining pregnancy tissue by scraping the inside of the uterus. But by that point, her organs had already begun to shut down, and she died on the operating table.
ProPublica cited a review committee that ruled that her death was preventable, and that she might have survived if she had been provided with a D&C earlier.
But the provision of the D&C would not have been illegal under the state’s law. In Thurman’s case, ultrasound confirmed that both of her twins were already deceased by the time she had reached the hospital, according to medical reports. That means that any heartbeat provision in the state law preventing a D&C of viable fetuses would not have applied.
ProPublica did not cite any experts blaming the law for the death of Thurman. Anti-abortion doctors and legal experts have said that the law did not prevent her from receiving treatment.
Dr. Christina Francis, CEO of the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists, told reporters before Harris’s speech that the signs Thurman presented with “would indicate a very severe bacterial infection.”
“In the setting of an induced abortion, the physician seeing her must suspect incomplete abortion,” said Francis. “In fact, any first year OB resident would be able to make that diagnosis, given those symptoms.”
The care necessary to treat Thurman’s severe infection would have been, according to Francis and her colleague Dr. Ingrid Skopp, also an OB/GYN and and anti-abortion advocate, to quickly administer antibiotics and perform a D&C.
Katie Daniel, State Policy Director for SBA Pro-Life America, told reporters ahead of Harris’s speech that the argument that Georgia’s abortion ban caused these preventable deaths is “flatly false.”
“Georgia bans procedures that cause the death of an unborn child whose heart is beating without a lawful justification,” said Daniel. “It did not ban any particular procedure. A D&C can always be performed if it is medically indicated to treat miscarriages or to treat abortion complications.”
Consequences of abortion bans
Harris said that former President Donald Trump, who appointed three of the six conservative justices who ruled in favor of overturning Roe, is indirectly responsible for Thurman’s death and the countless stories of other women who have received significantly delayed medical care in pregnancy-related emergencies due to confusion about state laws on abortion.
“This is a healthcare crisis, and Donald Trump is the architect,” said Harris.
Planned Parenthood Southeast, which runs clinics in Georgia, said in a statement on Wednesday that the deaths of both Thurman and Miller were examples of the predicted results of abortion bans.
“For years, advocates, medical professionals, and legal experts have warned Georgia lawmakers that these abortion bans would endanger lives, especially for women and birthing people in need of this lifesaving care,” reads the PPSE statement. “Sadly, these warnings were ignored, and now we are witnessing the deadly consequences of a law that fails to protect patients and criminalizes physicians.”
Miller, mother of three and a patient with lupus, reportedly purchased mifepristone and misoprostol online in November 2022 and did not seek medical treatment from physicians, even after developing severe complications, due to fear about being prosecuted under the state’s anti-abortion law.
Since Miller was not examined physically by a physician to obtain mifepristone and misoprostol, it is also unclear how far along in her pregnancy she was before taking the abortion pills, which are only approved by the Food and Drug Administration before 10 weeks of pregnancy.
Daniel also told reporters that, if Miller had sought medical care in Georgia, she would have legally been able to obtain an abortion should her pregnancy have resulted in dangerous complications due to her chronic illnesses.
The American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology, which supports no gestational limitations on abortion procedures, did not respond to the Washington Examiner’s request to speak with a physician about the Thurman and Miller cases.
Abortion pill complications
After Harris’s speech concluded, Francis told the Washington Examiner in a statement that the abortion drug mifepristone used by both Thurman and Miller was the primary cause of their unfortunate deaths, not anti-abortion laws.
“Deaths due to legal abortion drugs are the expected result of deregulating and falsely promoting them as safe, both of which the Biden-Harris administration has led efforts to do,” said Francis. “All state pro-life laws allow physicians to save the lives of pregnant women.”
The FDA’s warning label for mifepristone estimates that between 2.9% and 4.6% of medication abortion patients will seek emergency medical treatment due to life-threatening infection and sustained bleeding following a medication abortion.
A peer reviewed study of Medicaid-eligible women conducted by the Charlotte Lozier Institute, the research arm of SBA, found that they were “significantly more likely to have a severe or critical acuity rating” within 30 days of a self-administered medication abortion than other women seeking emergency medical attention.
By 2015, more than 75% of visits following abortion-pill usage were rated in the “severe or critical” categories, compared to 66% for surgical abortions and 57% for live births.