How Georgia’s LIFE Act Killed Amber Thurman

If the Christian right had not prevailed in the Supreme Court, Amber Nicole Thurman would still be alive today. She could have received the medical care she needed in 2022. She could have pursued her career ambitions and watched her little boy grow up. Instead, the 28-year-old died a completely preventable death in a Georgia hospital because the doctors treating her were terrified of committing a crime under the state’s abortion ban.

The real crime is that Thurman’s life was cut short by ideologues who spent 50 years proclaiming “biblical” values ​​and trying to make women pay for unwanted pregnancies, sometimes with their lives.

A new report in ProPublica reveals the details of Thurman’s agonizing final days and her death, which was recently ruled “preventable” by a state medical committee. Thurman learned she was pregnant with twins in the summer of 2022. As the mother of a young son, she wanted to attend nursing school and “quickly decided she needed to preserve her newfound stability,” her best friend Ricaria Baker told ProPublica.

But three years earlier, Georgia’s Republican-controlled legislature passed a law banning abortions after the sixth week of pregnancy. After the Supreme Court struck down the right to abortion enshrined in Roe v. Wade in June 2022, the ban went into effect. Georgia was one of the first states to end virtually all abortions, and many other Republican-governed states soon followed. The law—dystopianly titled the Living Infants and Fairness Equality Act, or LIFE Act—does include a vague exception to protect the life of the mother. But most of the exceptions in these laws, reports the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization supporting reproductive rights, “are designed to be impractical, contain vague and contradictory language, and impose cumbersome requirements.”

When the Georgia ban went into effect, Thurman was just six weeks pregnant. According to ProPublica, Thurman scheduled a dilation and curettage in North Carolina, where abortions were still legal. But when she couldn’t travel because of traffic, the clinic — “inundated with women from other states where the ban had gone into effect” — couldn’t keep her appointment. A clinic employee gave her legally purchased abortion pills instead. (“Her pregnancy was completely within the standard of care for this procedure,” ProPublica reports.)

Unfortunately, after returning home, Thurman suffered a highly unusual complication that included increasing pain and heavy bleeding. The North Carolina clinic would have performed a D&C as a free follow-up, but it was too far away. Instead, Thurman went to a nearby hospital. ProPublica cites medical records that say that “doctors noticed a foul odor during a pelvic exam and an ultrasound showed possible tissue in her uterus.”

Normally, these signs of sepsis would be treated with a curettage, which removes fetal tissue. But the LIFE Act prohibits “the use of any instrument… with the purpose of terminating a pregnancy.” That made performing this normally routine and safe procedure a potential crime for doctors. Hospital staff delayed the procedure for nearly a day as Thurman’s condition worsened. Finally, hours after her organs began to fail, she was admitted for surgery – during which she died. Her mother recalled her last words: “Promise me you will take care of my son.”

It was not Thurman’s legal use of abortion pills that caused her death. Deaths resulting from taking abortion pills are extremely rare. “Of nearly 6 million women who have taken mifepristone in the United States since 2000, 32 deaths have been reported to the FDA through 2022, regardless of whether the drug played a role,” ProPublica reports. “Of those, 11 patients developed sepsis.” Amber Thurman’s cause of death was the Republican-led criminalization of health care when she developed a condition that required immediate life-saving treatment. The LIFE Act killed Amber Thurman.

The LIFE Act is the result of rigidly-minded religious zealots seizing political power. Abortion opponents, who claim to have a purer and more literal interpretation of Christianity than anyone else and to have divine instruction to conform American law to it, insisted on doing so. They insisted on repealing Roe v. Wade and labored for five decades until former President Donald Trump made their dream a reality, making good on his promise of a right-leaning majority on the Supreme Court. That majority, in turn, unleashed the sadistic laws that endanger the lives of women in dozens of states and restrict their right to make their own choices and receive life-saving treatment.

When Georgia Governor Brian Kemp signed the bill, he said, “Georgia is a state that values ​​life.” He added, “We stand up for those who cannot speak for themselves.” Yet when Amber Thurman lay in a hospital bed, none of these “pro-life” heroes were there to treat her as a person with even a shred of dignity, let alone any rights.

Trump knows that stories like this – and Thurman’s is far from the only one – are bad news for his campaign. So he is once again misleading the public about the fallout from the Dobbs decision, his crucial role in criminalizing abortion, and his Project 2025 allies’ plans for another term. At last week’s presidential debate, he brazenly lied that all sides “wanted this issue to be brought back to the states where people can vote.”

But Americans were not asking for the issue to be “brought back to the states” so that Christian nationalist lawmakers could dictate the most intimate decisions of their lives. Amber Thurman was not asking her governor to lecture her on life. She just wanted to live.