This week, ProPublica published an article blaming Georgia’s 2022 abortion law for the death of Amber Thurman. Amber was a 28-year-old medical assistant and the single mother of a 6-year-old boy. In the summer of 2022, she found out she was pregnant with twins and decided she needed to have an abortion. Since she was past six weeks, she couldn’t legally get one in Georgia, so she drove to North Carolina, where she had a medication abortion. She took the first pill at the North Carolina clinic, drove home, and then took the second pill the next day as directed. Four days later, after an increase in pain and vaginal bleeding, she vomited blood and passed out, her boyfriend called 911, and an ambulance took her to the hospital.
Doctors diagnosed her with acute severe sepsis, meaning that the second abortion pill, which causes contractions and bleeding to expel a dead embryo after he or she is suffocated by the first pill, had failed to remove all of her dead twins’ bodies, and the dead tissue left behind in her uterus was causing an infection. The standard treatment is a D&C, or dilation and curettage, in which a doctor uses surgical implements to empty the uterus. A D&C can also be used as a method of elective abortion that kills living embryos and removes them from the uterus. But importantly, that’s not what was under consideration in Amber’s case. Her twins were already dead; part of their dead bodies remained in her uterus and was causing an infection, and the dead tissue needed to be removed in order to save Amber’s life.
Doctors discussed performing a D&C multiple times, and noted that Amber’s condition was continuing to worsen, but they did not actually get her into surgery until 20 hours after she arrived at the hospital. By then, her condition had deteriorated so much that she died on the operating table.
Georgia’s maternal mortality review committee, a committee of experts that investigates maternal deaths with the goal of advising on policies to reduce the maternal mortality rate, investigated Amber’s 2022 death this summer (in line with their usual lag time) and found that her death was “preventable,” that the hospital’s delay in performing the D&C had a “large” impact on her outcome, and that there is a “good chance” that if doctors had performed the D&C earlier she would have survived. ProPublica heavily implies that the delay in care that caused Amber’s death was due to doctors being worried that they would be prosecuted for performing the D&C because Georgia’s abortion law’s life of the mother exception didn’t make it clear whether that was allowed. Let’s look at whether they’re right.
