Women killed by Dobbs decision

Updated 3:20 PM ET September 18, 2024

SSome tragedies cannot be preventedor even predict. Amber Nicole Thurman’s death was not. She was probably the first woman killed by a takedown Roe v. Wade.

In June 2022, the Supreme Court issued a ruling in the case Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization removed the constitutional right to abortion guaranteed by Roe. As a result, individual states reverted to their own laws. In Georgia, where Thurman lived, abortions became illegal from the moment a “human heartbeat was detectable” — around six weeks into pregnancy. The law took effect in late July of this year, around the time Thurman, a 28-year-old medical assistant, discovered she was six weeks pregnant with twins.

Thanks to ProPublica, which obtained Thurman’s medical records with the consent of her family, we can see what happened next. She already had a 6-year-old son and decided she couldn’t have two more children. But she couldn’t get an abortion in her home state. So she scheduled a surgical abortion in North Carolina, took the day off work, hired a babysitter, borrowed a relative’s car under false pretenses, and woke up at 4 a.m. to drive four hours to the clinic with a friend. But they got stuck in traffic, and Thurman didn’t show up for her appointment. The clinic couldn’t give her another appointment because so many women from other states, also struggling with the tough new laws, were booked that day.

So Thurman was offered abortion pills instead. They are widely used and are largely safe and effective for early pregnancies. But in fewer than 5 percent of cases, women need another dose or a procedure called dilation and curettage (D&C) to completely empty the uterus. In countries and states where abortion is legal, it is a simple and routine procedure that carries few risks.

But not in Georgia. At home, Thurman’s bleeding continued. She went to the hospital at 6:51 p.m. on Aug. 18, and medical tests showed all the classic signs that her abortion was incomplete and that the tissue left inside her was poisoning her blood. But doctors didn’t give her a curettage. They didn’t do it the next morning either, because her condition continued to deteriorate. When she was finally taken to the operating room at 2 p.m., she was so bad that doctors began removing her intestines and uterus.

But it was too late. Thurman’s heart stopped on the operating table.

Her mother waited outside. She had no idea, ProPublica reports, that her daughter’s condition was life-threatening. She didn’t understand why Amber told her as she was being led into the operating room, “Promise me you’ll take care of my son.”

Ttwo years after Thurman’s deathGeorgia’s official Maternal Mortality Review Board concluded that the incident could have been prevented and that she would have had a “good chance” of survival if she had had D&C earlier. Former President Donald Trump, who appointed half of the six-judge majority in Dobbsstill claims that “everyone wanted” Roe be overturned. But that’s not true. “This young mother should be alive, raising her son and pursuing her dream of going to nursing school,” Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris said in a statement responding to ProPublica’s investigation.

Read: Kamala Harris’s greatest asset

Thurman’s story plays out in every country where abortion is banned. Women still seek abortions, but now they do so in unsafe or dangerous conditions or with inadequate medical supervision. They lie to their friends and family about where they are going, drive or fly for hours to seek care, and then return home, likely bleeding heavily. Having to travel to get an abortion greatly increases the risks of the procedure. Until abortion was legalized in Ireland and Northern Ireland in 2018, women traveled secretly to England. (Many still do, because access is limited.) Polish women travel to the Netherlands. In El Salvador, where anti-abortion laws are so strict that women have been jailed for natural miscarriages and premature births, the wealthy fly to Miami to get abortions. Around the world, women without access to abortion care are looking for DIY solutions. ProPublica reported today on a Georgia woman in that situation, Candi Miller, who died after buying abortion pills online. The mother of three had an autoimmune disease and other conditions that significantly increased the health risks of pregnancy.

Add to these women those whose pregnancies end naturally—as many women do. Laws that threaten to penalize abortion providers have made doctors and hospitals hesitant to perform procedures that many women who miscarry need urgently. In Poland, where abortion is illegal in almost all circumstances, Dorota Lalik, a 33-year-old pharmacist, died in 2023 after a Catholic hospital refused to perform a curettage when her water broke in the fifth month. Instead, she was advised to lie down with her feet up. She died of sepsis three days later—the same disease that killed Amber Thurman and the same disease that killed Savita Halappanavar, 31, the woman whose death from sepsis galvanized the campaign to legalize abortion in Ireland. For every death, there are dozens of near-complete miscarriages. On the first night of the Democratic National Convention, delegates heard from Amanda Zurawski, who began having a miscarriage at 18 weeks, after she had already started shopping for baby clothes. Because of new laws in Texas, doctors waited until her temperature began to spike—an urgent sign of infection—before giving her the necessary medication. “Women are bleeding in parking lots, being turned away from emergency rooms, losing the ability to have children,” Harris noted in her statement. “Women are dying.”

Unfortunately, as familiar as the contours of Thurman’s story are, so too will the backlash. First comes the denial: Before the Georgia law was passed, state lawmakers referred to the idea that it would cause death as “hyperbolic fear-mongering.” Despite the state commission’s ruling that Thurman’s death was preventable, the Trump campaign has already argued that nothing in Georgia law prevented the D&C from being issued sooner. “President Trump has always supported the exceptions for rape, incest and the life of the mother that Georgia law provides,” a spokesman said. “With those exceptions in place, it is unclear why doctors did not act quickly to protect Amber Thurman’s life.”

Such arguments are naive at best, but more often than not, disingenuous. In Poland, a patient advocate said Lalik should have been told that her life could have been saved by an abortion—but she wasn’t. In Ireland, Sabaratnam Arulkumaran, a professor of medicine who led the investigation into Halappanavar’s death, found the law responsible. He said that without the (now repealed) Irish amendment that gives equal weight to the life of the mother and the fetus, doctors would have given Halappanavar the necessary medication. “We would never have heard of her, and she would be alive today,” he added. The same is true of Thurman’s death.

America is a litigious country, and some of the most extreme anti-abortion laws, such as Texas’s so-called bounty law, explicitly offer cash rewards to citizens if they can sue people who help women terminate their pregnancies. In such a climate, doctors naturally fear legal action. My colleague Sarah Zhang recently reported from Idaho, which has strict abortion laws. She found that some ob-gyns are leaving the state because of the impossible choice they have to make—leave a woman to die or risk their entire careers treating her. “I couldn’t live with myself if something bad happened to someone,” one doctor told Zhang. “But I also couldn’t live with myself if I went to prison and left my family and young children.”

When denial stops working, confusion sets in: Abortion drugs must be a real problem. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a plan of action for Trump’s second term, calls for additional inspections and regulation of these drugs—far beyond what is normal for similar non-abortion drugs. As a secondary goal, Project 2025 would like the FDA to completely revoke its approval of these drugs. (Perhaps sensing his unpopularity, Trump rejected Project 2025, but its co-authors include many from his previous administration and the wider community.) But Thurman’s story is not about the dangers of abortion pills. Hers is about the dangers of women failing to get simple, routine follow-up care after taking these pills because of government policy decisions.

It is not good enough, as Trump seems to think, to leave abortion law to the individual states. America cannot put itself in a situation where women have fewer rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in Georgia than in North Carolina. I was raised Catholic, and I understand the deep religious objections that some people have to abortion. But none of these fetuses—not Amber Thurman’s, not Dorothy Lalik’s, not Savita Halappanavar’s—could have been saved at the time the women sought emergency care. These three women could have been saved.

Read: Stop Softening the Republican Party’s Extreme Positions

Activists keep saying that abortion is on the November ballot. In some places, that’s literally true: advocates and lawmakers in nearly a dozen states have proposed constitutional amendments or other measures to protect or restore abortion rights. Trump knows that draconian red-state laws are deeply unpopular, hence his arduous effort to find a coherent position on an abortion-rights measure proposed in Florida, his adopted home state. His vice presidential candidate, Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio, has also reversed his former zeal for abortion restrictions, as the real consequences — and unpopularity — Dobbs the decision became obvious. In January 2022, before Roe was repealed, Vance said he would “certainly like to see abortion illegal nationwide” and also suggested that a “federal response” would be necessary in a hypothetical situation in which “George Soros sends a 747 to Columbus to load up a disproportionate number of black women to force them to have abortions in California.” Now, Vance says he’s content to follow Trump’s position — although that probably depends on whether Vance, unlike the rest of us, knows what that is.

I read the story of Amber Nicole Thurman’s death with a kind of cold rage. It didn’t have to happen. Without Dobbsit wouldn’t have happened. And it will continue to happen. Something went terribly wrong in America when people who call themselves pro-life sentenced a little boy to go to bed that night and every night without his mother.