THE FACTS: The two women died after seeking chemical abortions, but there is no evidence that the state’s abortion ban is to blame for Thurman’s death or that her doctors faced penalties for treating her.
In 2019, Georgia passed a law banning abortion after six weeks gestation, approximately when fetal cardiac activity can be detected via ultrasound, a measure intended to take immediate effect when Roe was overturned.
But Thurman was approximately nine weeks pregnant with twins when she traveled to a North Carolina abortion clinic, where she was given mifepristone and misoprostol to take at home.
Five days after taking the abortion agent misoprostol, which induces contractions to expel the pregnancy tissue, Thurman presented at the emergency room on a stretcher with heavy bleeding, vomiting, foul-smelling vaginal discharge, critically elevated white blood cell count, and dropping blood pressure.
Thurman waited three hours before being administered antibiotics and more than 20 hours to receive a dilation and curettage, which involves dilating the patient’s cervix and surgically removing the remaining pregnancy tissue by scraping the inside of the uterus. But by that point, her organs had already begun to shut down, and she died on the operating table.
ProPublica cited a review committee that ruled that her death was preventable and that she might have survived if she had been provided with a D&C earlier.
But the provision of the D&C would not have been illegal under the state’s law. In Thurman’s case, ultrasound confirmed that both of her twins were already deceased by the time she had reached the hospital, according to medical reports. That means that any heartbeat provision in the state law preventing a D&C of viable fetuses would not have applied.
ProPublica did not cite any experts blaming the law for the death of Thurman. Anti-abortion doctors and legal experts have said that the law did not prevent her from receiving treatment.
Dr. Christina Francis, CEO of the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists, told reporters before Harris’s speech that the signs Thurman presented with “would indicate a very severe bacterial infection.”
“In the setting of an induced abortion, the physician seeing her must suspect incomplete abortion,” Francis said. “In fact, any first year OB resident would be able to make that diagnosis, given those symptoms.”
The care necessary to treat Thurman’s severe infection would have been, according to Francis and her colleague, Dr. Ingrid Skopp, also an OB/GYN and and anti-abortion advocate, to quickly administer antibiotics and perform a D&C.
Katie Daniel, state policy director for SBA Pro-Life America, told reporters ahead of Harris’s speech that the argument that Georgia’s abortion ban caused these preventable deaths is “flatly false.”
“Georgia bans procedures that cause the death of an unborn child whose heart is beating without a lawful justification,” Daniel said. “It did not ban any particular procedure. A D&C can always be performed if it is medically indicated to treat miscarriages or to treat abortion complications.”