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,” Harris said, 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 6-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,” Harris said in her speech Friday, “under the Trump abortion ban, her doctors faced up to a decade in prison for providing Amber the care she needed.”
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.
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,” Francis said. “In fact, any first year OB resident would be able to make that diagnosis, given those symptoms.”
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,” Francis said. “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.
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2024 Election
