Source: ProPublica
Just as doctors, nurses and reproductive rights advocates told Republican lawmakers across the country would happen, women are now dying due to abortion bans and procedure restrictions enacted after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade on June 24, 2022.
A new article by investigative news outlet ProPublica looks at the story of Amber Nicole Thurman, a 28-year-old Georgia medical assistant who tried to get an abortion in July 2022 and then died from an infection that was preventable and also treatable with a routine procedure – one that she was unable to get because of new, highly restrictive laws.
Although Thurman was from Georgia, her story took a tragic turn after she attempted to get reproductive care in North Carolina. According to family members, when Georgia’s six-week abortion ban went into effect on July 20, 2022, Thurman’s pregnancy had just passed that mark.
The single mother of one wanted to get a surgical abortion near her home outside Atlanta and “held out hope as advocates tried to get the ban paused in court,” her friend told the news outlet. Thurman continued to wait until she felt she no longer could – in her ninth week of pregnancy – and scheduled a routine procedure called a dilation and curettage (D&C) at a clinic in North Carolina, the nearest state where abortion was still legal at nine weeks.
When Georgia passed its ban, it also made performing a D&C (which clears fetal tissue from a person’s body) a felony, with few and unclear exceptions. Any doctor who performed a D&C in the state could be prosecuted and sentenced to as many as 10 years in prison.
Thurman and her best friend woke up at 4 a.m. on Aug. 13, 2022, to travel to North Carolina for a D&C. As her friend told ProPublica, they hit standstill traffic and the clinic couldn’t hold Thurman’s spot for more than 15 minutes due to the clinic being at capacity with women from other states where abortion bans had taken effect.
When Thurman and her friend finally made it to the North Carolina clinic, she had missed her appointment and an employee there offered her the U.S. Food and Drug Administration-approved two-pill abortion regimen of mifepristone and misoprostol. Because of the ordeal of getting to the clinic in the first place (taking a day off from work, finding child care, borrowing a vehicle, driving to another state, dealing with anti-abortion protesters), Thurman decided to use the pills to get a medication abortion instead of rescheduling the D&C procedure.
Thurman took the pills as instructed but complications arose after taking the second pill. According to her friend, Thurman was in a lot of pain and bleeding heavily. The North Carolina clinic told ProPublica that had Thurman lived nearby, they would have performed a D&C for free at her follow-up appointment, but she lived four hours away and couldn’t make it back.
On Aug. 18, Thurman vomited blood and passed out at home. Her boyfriend called 911 and she was transported to a hospital outside Atlanta at 6:51 p.m. Despite clear evidence that Thurman had sepsis and needed antibiotics and a D&C, doctors would not perform one.
Nearly three hours after her arrival, doctors started her on antibiotics and an IV drip. The hospital’s OB-GYN noted the possibility of performing a D&C the next day, but that didn’t happen.
By 5:14 a.m., Thurman was at risk of bleeding out and her blood pressure was extremely low. She was given more antibiotics instead of performing the newly criminalized D&C. Doctors then put her on a blood pressure support medication that is known to constrict blood flow so much that some patients end up needing an amputation.
By 6:45 a.m., her blood pressure had continued to drop and she was taken to the ICU.
At 7:14 a.m., doctors discussed performing a D&C but decided against it. Two hours later, Thurman’s organs began to fail.
At 12:05 p.m., an ICU doctor told the OB-GYN that her condition was deteriorating even more rapidly.
At 2 p.m., Thurman was finally taken into an operating room. The situation had gotten so bad that doctors had to perform open abdominal surgery and found that her bowel needed to be removed – but couldn’t perform the surgery because of constricted blood flow to the area. The OB finally performed the D&C but then had to do a hysterectomy.
During surgery, Thurman’s heart stopped.
These laws, as experts predicted, have resulted in doctors reconsidering the type of care to provide to their patients out of fear of prosecution. Many states with these laws only allow doctors to perform these procedures if their patient is “inarguably on the brink of death” or facing “irreversible” harm, which are not terms rooted in science or medicine and are thus open to interpretation.
“They would feel the need to wait for a higher blood pressure, wait for a higher fever — really got to justify this one — bleed a little bit more,” Dr. Melissa Kottke, an OB-GYN at Emory, warned lawmakers in 2019 during one of the hearings over Georgia’s ban.
According to studies cited by ProPublica, the availability of D&Cs for abortions and miscarriage care helped save many lives after the Supreme Court ruling in Roe v. Wade in 1973 by reducing the rate of maternal deaths for women of color by up to 40% in just the first year after abortion was legalized.
Since the latest SCOTUS ruling on Roe that led to bans or restrictions in 22 states, women have been turned away from emergency rooms and told they’re not in enough danger to be treated, some have been forced to continue high-risk pregnancies that threatened their lives, and women whose pregnancies weren’t viable have been told they can’t be treated until they are sicker or are on the verge of a heart attack.
As ProPublica notes in their article, maternal health state committees – like the one in Georgia that recently ruled Thurman’s death as “preventable” and said there is a “good chance” providing a D&C earlier could have saved her life – operate on a two-year lag behind the cases they look at, meaning that experts are just now beginning to see the deaths caused by the Supreme Court’s decision.
Thurman’s experience trying to get care in North Carolina more than two years ago has only become more common since then as abortion access has been eliminated in Tennessee, Alabama and Mississippi, and six-week bans are in effect in South Carolina, Georgia and Florida. Our state’s 12-week ban has also resulted in packed clinics.
“Our clinics have been so busy trying to keep up with those trying to seek care here in North Carolina, but also those from our neighboring states, especially Georgia and South Carolina,” Dr. Robin Wallace, a family physician in Chapel Hill, said in March. “My colleagues in Charlotte and Asheville are seeing folks from Tennessee of course, and from other parts of the South.”
Following their report on Thurman’s death, ProPublica published another article about another Georgia mother, Candi Miller, who died due to Georgia’s abortion ban.
Stories like Thurman and Miller’s will become increasingly common as we learn more about the impact of these bans. North Carolinians aren’t immune to these cases, either. Our state currently has a 12-week ban and reproductive rights will be on the ballot this fall as candidates like Mark Robinson, Hal Weatherman, Dan Bishop and Jefferson Griffin, among others, are running for office and support a complete ban on abortion.
Click here to read the full story on Amber Nicole Thurman.
Click here to read the full story on Candi Miller.
