Reproductive justice advocates have been warning for more than two years that the end of Roe v. Wade would lead to surge in maternal mortality among patients denied abortion care—and that the increase was likely to be greatest among low-income women of color. Now, a new report by ProPublica has uncovered the first such verified death. A 28-year-old medical assistant and Black single mother in Georgia died from a severe infection after a hospital delayed a routine medical procedure that had been outlawed under that state’s six-week abortion ban.
Amber Nicole Thurman’s death, in August 2022, was officially deemed “preventable” by a state committee tasked with reviewing pregnancy-related deaths. Thurman’s case is the first time a preventable abortion-related death has come to public attention since the Supreme Court overturned Roe, ProPublica‘s Kavitha Surana reported.
Now, “we actually have the substantiated proof of something we already knew—that abortion bans kill people.”
Now, “we actually have the substantiated proof of something we already knew—that abortion bans kill people,” said Mini Timmaraju, president of the abortion-rights group Reproductive Freedom for All, during a call with media. “It cannot go on.”
Thurman is almost certainly not the only person to have died as a consequence of an abortion ban, even if her case is the first to be officially confirmed. As ProPublica noted, that’s because investigations of maternal deaths often don’t happen until years later:
Committees like the one in Georgia, set up in each state, often operate with a two-year lag behind the cases they examine, meaning that experts are only now beginning to delve into deaths that took place after the Supreme Court overturned the federal right to abortion.
Earlier this year, the New Yorker reported on the story of Yeniifer Alvarez-Estrada Glick, a 29-year-old woman in Texas who died in July 2022 from complications of a high-risk pregnancy. In that case, medical records did “not suggest any discussion of the fact that an abortion could have alleviated the additional strain that the pregnancy placed on her heart,” the New Yorker reported.
According to ProPublica, Thurman had decided to get an abortion after learning she was pregnant with twins. But the very day she passed the six-week mark of her pregnancy, Georgia implemented a ban forbidding abortion after six weeks’ gestation—as the Supreme Court allowed states to do when it overturned Roe earlier that summer. So Thurman traveled four hours to an abortion clinic in North Carolina, where abortions were then allowed past 20 weeks. There she was given mifepristone and misoprostol, a two-drug regimen used to end pregnancies.
A few days after she took the pills, Thurman’s pain became excruciating, and she was bleeding through a pad every hour. Complications from abortion pills are rare, but sometimes patients require a procedure called dilation and curettage, or D&C, to remove remaining fetal tissue from the uterus that could lead to life-threatening sepsis. The North Carolina clinic would have performed the D&C for free if Thurman lived closer, ProPublica said. Instead, after vomiting blood and passing out at home, Thurman was brought to the hospital in the Atlanta suburbs, where doctors noted signs of an infection. According to ProPublica,
The standard treatment of sepsis is to start antibiotics and immediately seek and remove the source of the infection. For a septic abortion, that would include removing any remaining tissue from the uterus. One of the hospital network’s own practices describes a D&C as a “fairly common, minor surgical procedure” to be used after a miscarriage to remove fetal tissue.
But because D&Cs can be used to perform abortions, physicians operating under an abortion ban can be slow to provide them even for miscarriages and other emergency situations, as illustrated in a recent report on post-Roe disruptions to pregnancy care in Louisiana. Not until 2 p.m. the day after Thruman entered the hospital was she brought for surgery. She died in the operating room. The Georgia maternal mortality review committee found that if a D&C had been performed earlier, there was a “good chance” her death could have been prevented, ProPublica reports.
“These devastating bans did not only block Amber, and many others, from accessing abortion care in her state, they also delayed the routine life-saving care she later needed, leaving her to suffer and die,” Timmaraju said during the press call on Monday.
While every state abortion ban contains exceptions to save the life of the pregnant person, uncertainty among medical providers over exactly when doctors can step in without fear of being prosecuted has led to delays in medical care for pregnant woman across the country, with devastating consequences.
On the call with reporters, leaders of reproductive justice organizations pointed to the way bans and delays in emergency medical care for pregnant people disproportionately impact Black women. Black women are about 2.6 times more likely to die from a pregnancy-related cause than white women, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“Reproductive justice is not just about abortion access, but also about the broader right to quality, comprehensive, full-range, culturally humble care, life saving health care for all of us,” said KR Redman, executive director of SPARK, a reproductive justice group in Georgia. “Amber’s case is just an example of the ongoing systemic negligence that continues to claim the lives of Black folks.”
