Vice President Kamala Harris is scheduled to speak about abortion in Atlanta on Friday following the publication of two stories of mothers in Georgia who died as a result of complications from chemical abortions following the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade in June 2022.
Harris’s speech about the deaths of Amber Thurman, 28, and Candi Miller, 41, is part of an effort from her campaign to make abortion rights the focus of the race for the White House before Election Day in November, according to campaign officials who spoke to the New York Times under conditions of anonymity.
The deaths of both Thurman and Miller, reported this week by ProPublica, occurred within months of Georgia enacting a ban on elective abortions after six weeks of pregnancy. Harris has blamed the death of Thurman on the state law and on former President Donald Trump, who has taken credit for the overturning of Roe because of his historic opportunity to appoint three conservative justices to the Supreme Court.
Thurman, mother to a 6-year-old son, took the abortion pills mifepristone and misoprostol in August 2022 at approximately nine weeks pregnant with twins.
But Thurman was only given antibiotics three hours after presenting at the emergency room with signs of a severe infection due to an incomplete expulsion of the remaining pregnancy tissue.
The procedure to remove the remaining pregnancy tissue, known as a dilation and curettage or D&C, was not performed on Thurman until 20 hours after she arrived at the hospital, and she died during the procedure.
Miller, mother to three children, pursued a medication abortion in November 2022 in part due to chronic conditions that would have made pregnancy difficult or life-threatening.
According to the ProPublica story on Miller’s case, she ordered the abortion pills mifepristone and misoprostol online and did not seek medical attention when she developed symptoms of an infection due to retaining pregnancy tissue.
Miller’s family reportedly told the coroner after her death that she did not seek medical attention “due to the current legislation on pregnancies and abortions.”
Aides for the Harris campaign told the New York Times that the vice president believes her best strategy is to leverage her messaging on abortion in states with gestational age limits on abortion to galvanize voters.
Harris has dubbed state laws prohibiting or restricting abortion “Trump Abortion Bans” and has vowed to enact federal law protecting abortion rights.
“Women are bleeding out in parking lots, turned away from emergency rooms, losing their ability to ever have children again. Survivors of rape and incest are being told they cannot make decisions about what happens next to their bodies. And now women are dying,” Harris said in reaction to Thurman’s case. “These are the consequences of Donald Trump’s actions.”
Anti-abortion advocates, however, argue that gestational age limits and other restrictions on abortion do not prevent medical professionals from providing care for pregnant women in medical crises like Thurman and Miller.
“No state law, including Georgia’s, prevents a hospital from treating a woman in a medical emergency,” State Policy Director for SBA Pro-Life America Katie Glenn Daniel said on X. “It says so in the FIRST PARAGRAPH of GA’s right to know booklet. Removing the remains of already deceased babies is NOT an abortion.”
SBA Pro-Life America is one of the leading anti-abortion advocacy organizations in the United States and has been instrumental in passing gestational age limit legislation and other health and safety regulations for abortion.
Following the release of details about Thurman’s case, American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists CEO Christina Francis highlighted that mifepristone is a legal drug that results in similar complications in approximately 3% of cases, according to the Food and Drug Administration’s warning label.
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“Rather than highlighting the dangers of these drugs, which have caused numerous deaths, abortion proponents are instead trying to blame Georgia’s laws in their push to protect induced abortion at all costs,” said Francis.
The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, which does not support any legal limitations on abortion, has not commented on the cases of either Thurman or Miller.