Georgia woman dies after abortion ban delays life-saving treatment – ​​Mother Jones

peakSTOCK/Getty

Advocates of reproductive justice have been warning for more than two years about the end of Roe v. Wade would lead to an increase in maternal mortality among patients denied abortion – and this increase is likely to be greatest among low-income women of color. Now a new report from ProPublica has revealed the first confirmed death of its kind. A 28-year-old physician’s assistant and single black mother in Georgia died of a severe infection after a hospital postponed a routine medical procedure that was prohibited under the state’s ban on abortion beginning at the sixth week of pregnancy.

The August 2022 death of Amber Nicole Thurman was officially ruled “preventable” by a state panel tasked with investigating pregnancy-related deaths. Thurman’s case marks the first time a preventable abortion-related death has become public knowledge since the Supreme Court overturned the ruling. roe, ProPublicaKavitha Surana reported.

Now “we actually have solid evidence for something we already knew – that abortion bans kill people,” said Mini Timmaraju, president of the abortion rights group Reproductive freedom for all, during a phone call with the media. “This cannot continue.”

Thurman is almost certainly not the only person to have died as a result of an abortion ban, although her case is the first to be officially confirmed. ProPublica This is because investigations into maternal deaths often only take place years later:

Panels like Georgia’s, which are set up in each state, often operate with a two-year lag between the cases they review, meaning experts are only now beginning to look at deaths that occurred after the Supreme Court struck down federal abortion rights.

Beginning of the year New Yorkers reported the story of Yeniifer Alvarez-Estrada Glick, a 29-year-old woman in Texas who died in July 2022 from complications of a high-risk pregnancy. In this case, medical records “did not indicate that an abortion could have alleviated the additional strain the pregnancy placed on her heart,” the New Yorkers reported.

Accordingly ProPublica, Thurman had decided to have an abortion after learning she was expecting twins, but on the very day she passed six weeks of pregnancy, Georgia passed a ban prohibiting abortions after six weeks of pregnancy – just as the Supreme Court allowed states to do when it struck down the law. roe earlier this summer. So Thurman traveled four hours to an abortion clinic in North Carolina that allowed abortions after 20 weeks. There she was given mifepristone and misoprostol, a two-drug regimen used to end pregnancies.

A few days after taking the pills, Thurman’s pain became unbearable and she was bleeding every hour through a pad. Complications from abortion pills are rare, but sometimes patients need a procedure called dilation and curettage, or D&C, to remove remaining fetal tissue from the uterus that could lead to life-threatening sepsis. The North Carolina clinic would have performed the D&C for free if Thurman had lived closer, ProPublica said. Instead, after vomiting blood and falling unconscious at home, Thurman was taken to a hospital in a suburb of Atlanta, where doctors found signs of infection. According to ProPublica,

The standard treatment for sepsis is to give antibiotics and immediately find and eliminate the source of infection. In the case of a septic abortion, this would include removing any remaining tissue from the uterus. One of the hospital network’s practices describes a D&C as a “fairly common, minor surgical procedure” performed after a miscarriage to remove fetal tissue.

However, because curettage can also be used to perform abortions, doctors operating under an abortion ban may be reluctant to perform such curettage even in cases of miscarriage and other emergencies, as a recent report on postoperative pregnancies shows.roe Disruptions in pregnancy care in Louisiana. It was not until 2 p.m. the day after Thruman was admitted to the hospital that she was operated on. She died in the operating room. The Georgia Maternal Mortality Review Committee concluded that her death could have been prevented with an earlier curettage. ProPublica reports.

“These devastating bans not only denied Amber and many others access to abortion care in her state, they also delayed the routine life-saving care she later needed, leaving her to suffer and die,” Timmaraju said during Monday’s press conference.

Although every state abortion ban contains exceptions to save the life of the pregnant person, there is uncertainty among medical providers about where doctors can intervene without fear of prosecution has led to delays in medical care for pregnant women across the country – with devastating consequences.

In the conference call with reporters, representatives of reproductive justice organizations pointed out that bans and delays in emergency care for pregnant women disproportionately affect black women. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, black women are 2.6 times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than white women.

“Reproductive justice is not just about abortion access, but the broader right to high-quality, comprehensive, comprehensive, culturally responsive, life-saving health care for all of us,” said KR Redman, executive director of SPARK, a Georgia-based reproductive justice group. “Amber’s case is just one example of the ongoing systemic negligence that continues to claim Black lives.”