By Michelle Goldberg / The New York Times
It was inevitable, once Roe v. Wade was overturned and states started banning abortion, that women were going to die. Over the past two years, we’ve learned of countless close calls.
In Oklahoma, 25-year-old Jaci Statton, sick and bleeding with a nonviable partial molar pregnancy, said medical staff told her to wait in a parking lot until she was “crashing” or on the verge of a heart attack. In Florida, Anya Cook was sent home from the hospital after her membranes ruptured at 16 weeks; she then nearly bled to death in the bathroom of a hair salon. Women in Texas and Louisiana have been denied treatment for life-threatening ectopic pregnancies.
And now ProPublica has identified at least two women who died “after they couldn’t access legal abortions and timely medical care.” According to ProPublica’s Kavitha Surana, “There are almost certainly others.”
On Monday, thanks to Surana, we learned the story of one of those women, Amber Nicole Thurman, an otherwise healthy 28-year-old medical assistant from Georgia with a 6-year-old son. In 2022, Thurman and her child had just moved out of her family’s place and into their own apartment, and she was planning to start nursing school. When she found out she was pregnant with twins, her best friend told ProPublica, she felt she needed an abortion to preserve her newfound stability, but Georgia had enacted a six-week abortion ban, and she’d just passed the deadline.
She waited, hoping the law would be put on hold, but eventually she arranged babysitting, took time off from work and borrowed a car in order to get a surgical abortion in North Carolina. Though she and her best friend woke up at 4 a.m. for the drive, they hit terrible traffic on their way there. “The clinic couldn’t hold Thurman’s spot longer than 15 minutes; it was inundated with women from other states where bans had taken effect,” wrote Surana. It offered her a medication abortion instead.
Medication abortion is usually safe and effective, but in about 3% to 5% of cases, women end up needing either another dose of misoprostol, one of the two drugs in the regimen, or surgery. That’s what happened to Thurman. Days after taking her second pill, she was in pain and bleeding heavily. The clinic in North Carolina would have offered her free follow-up care, but it was too far away.
Eventually, suffering a severe infection, she passed out and ended up in a hospital in suburban Atlanta. She needed a D&C, a procedure to empty the uterus, but doctors waited 20 hours to operate as her blood pressure sank, and her organs began to fail. According to Surana, Thurman’s last words to her mother were, “Promise me you’ll take care of my son.” A state medical review committee ruled her death “preventable.”
ProPublica didn’t discover exactly why doctors let Thurman’s condition deteriorate for so long without treating her, but it’s not a stretch to assume they were scared. As in other states where women have been denied routine abortion care, Georgia’s ban includes an exception for procedures “necessary in order to prevent the death of the pregnant woman or the substantial and irreversible physical impairment of a major bodily function.” But as we’ve seen again and again, hospitals aren’t sure how to interpret this language, especially with the threat of prison time hanging over everyone involved. So medical staff sometimes hesitate to act until the threat to a woman’s life is undeniable, at which point it may be too late.
The shattering fallout from abortion prohibition was entirely predictable for anyone who has paid attention to such bans in other countries. In Ireland, for example, 31-year-old Savita Halappanavar died of septicemia in 2012 after doctors refused to treat her for a miscarriage as long as her fetus had a heartbeat. Her case helped galvanize support for Ireland’s 2018 national referendum to make abortion legal, which passed in a landslide.
It’s too early to know whether Thurman’s death will have a similarly catalytic effect in the United States. I suspect that the anti-abortion movement will claim that she was killed by abortion pills and use her case to further its quest to outlaw them. “Mandate for Leadership,” the legislative agenda laid out by Project 2025, a coalition of conservative groups close to Donald Trump, calls on the Food and Drug Administration to reverse its approval of “chemical abortion drugs.” It cites 26 deaths of women after taking mifepristone, the other drug in the medication abortion regimen.
FDA figures show that only half of those deaths — out of 4.9 million people who’ve used the medication — have anything to do with abortion. (Three of the cases, for example, are women who were confirmed or suspected homicide victims.) But the canard that abortion drugs are dangerous is a staple of anti-abortion propaganda, and conservative may try to use it to deflect outrage over Thurman’s death.
No one should let them. All medications come with some risk, but abortion pills are safer than penicillin or Viagra and significantly less perilous than childbirth. The complications Thurman faced didn’t have to be deadly; a timely medical intervention could have saved her life. And as long as abortion bans persist, more women are likely to die the same way. Some probably already have. As Surana notes, state committees tasked with reviewing maternal mortality typically operate with a two-year lag, so experts are only just beginning to delve into the details of pregnancy-related deaths that have happened since Roe was overturned. ProPublica plans to publish an investigation into a second woman’s death soon.
For now, it shouldn’t take even more stories of senseless suffering for these cruel laws to become politically untenable. In Ireland, the name Savita became a rallying cry. The name Amber should be one here.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times, c. 2024.
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