Sen. Kamala Harris on Tuesday denounced Donald Trump’s policies and condemned the state’s abortion ban, following reports that Georgia’s strict anti-abortion laws have led to women’s deaths due to lack of access to proper medical care.
Harris’ comments came on the heels of an investigative report published Monday by ProPublica detailing the circumstances surrounding the 2022 death of Amber Nicole Thurman, a medical assistant from Georgia. The outlet called the incident the first confirmed case of a “preventable” abortion-related death and said it plans to announce a second death in the coming days.
“This is the result of Donald Trump’s actions,” Harris said in a statement. Georgia’s six-week abortion ban goes into effect in 2022, shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade.
Thurman died from rare complications from taking the abortion pill. Several days after taking the pill, she was rushed to the emergency room with heavy bleeding because the fetal tissue had not yet been fully expelled from her body. Doctors were unsure about how to treat her and waited 20 hours to perform a routine procedure, according to the report. Thurman, 28, and the mother of a 6-year-old boy, died in emergency surgery.
“This young mother should be alive, raising her son and pursuing her dreams of attending nursing school,” said Harris, who made abortion rights a central issue in her presidential campaign. “This is exactly what we feared when Roe was struck down.”
In Georgia, it is a felony to perform an abortion after six weeks of pregnancy, and although the law allows for exceptions to save a pregnant woman’s life, doctors say the language is too vague to be enforced in practice.
As of 2022, more than 20 states have enacted abortion bans or restrictions.
After Thurman’s death, a state medical review board determined that her death was “preventable” and that she “likely would have survived” had she received surgery sooner, according to ProPublica.
ProPublica reported that Thurman fell pregnant just after Georgia’s six-week abortion ban went into effect and had just completed her pregnancy.
ProPublica reported that Thurman found a babysitter, took a day off work and traveled with her best friend to North Carolina for the procedure, called a dilation and curettage (D&C), on August 13.
But they got stuck in traffic on the drive there, and the clinic was unable to reserve a spot for Thurman for more than 15 minutes, her best friend told ProPublica.
As a result, Thurman received a two-medication abortion treatment approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, including mifepristone and misoprostol, because her pregnancy was within the standard of care for that treatment.
Medication abortion is the most common way to end a pregnancy in the United States, and death from complications is extremely rare.
At the North Carolina clinic, Thurman was given instructions on how to take the medication safely and was told to go to the emergency room if she experienced any complications, ProPublica reported.
She took the first dose at the clinic, drove home before symptoms began, and took the second pill the next day as instructed.
At first, he only had convulsions, but after a few days his condition worsened, with vomiting and heavy bleeding.
If she lived closer to the North Carolina clinic, she could have received a free cervical cancer screening immediately after the follow-up, the clinic’s executive director told ProPublica, but Thurman lives about four hours away.
Thurman lost consciousness and was rushed to a hospital outside Atlanta with a severe infection. According to ProPublica, Thurman needed a dilation procedure, but the surgery was delayed for about 20 hours after her blood pressure dropped and her organs began to fail.
The report states that she was diagnosed with “acute severe sepsis” the following morning, but a D&C was not performed.
About 20 hours after arriving at the hospital, doctors performed a cervical cancer screening and discovered she would also need a hysterectomy, during which Thurman’s heart stopped.
The Georgia Maternal Mortality Review Board determined there was a “reasonable probability” that Thurman’s death could have been prevented if she had been screened earlier.
Thurman had been planning to enroll in nursing school before her death, a friend told ProPublica, and she and her children had recently moved out of her parents’ home and into an apartment of their own.
According to the outlet, Thurman’s last words to her mother before she died were, “Promise me you’ll take care of my son.”
Studies have shown that the increased availability of abortion and dilation for miscarriage care in the year after Roe v. Wade was passed in 1973 reduced maternal mortality rates for women of color by up to 40 percent.
But since more than 20 states have enacted abortion bans or restrictions in the past two years, women with medical complications have repeatedly been turned away from emergency rooms.
“Women are bleeding to death in parking lots, being turned away from emergency rooms, and never being able to have children,” Harris said in a statement. “Survivals of rape and incest are being told they cannot decide what happens to their bodies next. And now women are dying.”
As president, Trump appointed three conservative Supreme Court justices who played crucial roles in overturning Roe, and as a candidate he has bragged about his role in overturning Roe v. Wade and complained that Republican extremism on the issue could hurt elections.
“If Donald Trump gets his chance, he will sign a nationwide abortion ban, which will create even more of these horrific realities,” Harris said. “We must enact legislation to restore reproductive freedom. If I were president of the United States, I would be proud to sign this legislation. People’s lives depend on it.”
Mini Timmaraj, president of Nara Pro-Choice America, said at a press conference on Monday that Thurman’s death “confirms what we already knew: abortion bans kill people and we cannot continue this way.”
Regina Davis Moss, CEO of In Our Own Voice: A National Black Women’s Reproductive Justice Agenda, said in a statement that what happened to Thurman was “completely preventable,” adding that it is “the reality for many Black women, girls and gender-expanding people in the post-Dobbs era.”
Moss also pointed to a study that estimates that if abortion bans were enacted in all states, maternal mortality rates for black women could increase by an “ashamed” 39 percent.
Lauren Gambino contributed to this report
