In the photo that she posted on Facebook, Amber Nicole Thurman looks radiant. Kneeling in the surf, the 28-year-old clutches her now six-year-old son as waves break around them, both wearing matching smiles. It’s the type of photo any mom can relate to.
A year later, Thurman would be dead because of the state of Georgia’s law banning abortion after six weeks of pregnancy. It feels like an almost absurdly cruel irony that this law, which went into effect in 2022 following the overturning of Roe v. Wade, is called the Living Infants and Fairness Equality, or “LIFE” Act.
Thurman’s story is one of two published by ProPublica this week examining the impact of Georgia’s ban on maternal health, and what reporter Kavitha Surana discovered was devastating. She found that the deaths of Thurman and another Georgia woman, Candi Miller, can be directly linked to their inability to access abortion care under the new law.
“There are almost certainly others,” she notes, not just in Georgia but elsewhere where abortion has been restricted.
Both women died in 2022, just weeks or months after the bill passed. Thurman had discovered she was pregnant with twins in July and decided to terminate the pregnancy. However, she had barely missed the opportunity to get an abortion under the new law, as her pregnancy had just passed the six-week mark.
After a few weeks of waiting to see if the law would be overturned, Thurman and a friend traveled to North Carolina to get a legal abortion when she was nine weeks pregnant. At the clinic, which was overrun with other patients from banned abortion states, Thurman was unable to get a surgical abortion and instead was given abortion pills.
Despite following the clinic’s instructions, Thurman began to experience complications like heavy bleeding. She then began to vomit blood. Her boyfriend called an ambulance and Thurman was transported to a hospital.
Medical experts consulted by ProPublica said that should have been clear that Thurman was experiencing a life-threatening complication based on her symptoms. But even after an on-call OB diagnosed her with “acute severe sepsis” due to retained tissue from her abortion, staff did not perform a D&C, the common surgical procedure to remove the septic tissue. Instead, they gave Thurman antibiotics and an IV drip and waited.
Experts quoted by ProPublica said one of the potential outcomes of restrictive abortion bans is it forces medical professionals to decide if a patient’s condition is essentially “bad enough” to warrant intervening and weigh that against the threat of prosecution if they are deemed to do so in error.
By the time medical professionals decided to treat Thurman with a D&C 20 hours after she arrived, it was too late. Thurman died during the surgery. A maternal mortality review committee later determined that if Thurman had been treated earlier, there is a “good chance” she’d still be alive.
Miller’s story, published on Wednesday, while different, has some similar parts. The 41-year-old mother of three also experienced excruciating pain after attempting to have a medication abortion at home in November 2022, and her abortion also did not fully expel all the fetal tissue. In the report, family members told ProPublica that Miller had ordered the pills online because she was afraid to see a doctor or go to a clinic “due to the current legislation on pregnancies and abortions.”
