ATLANTA — Vice President Kamala Harris early Tuesday highlighted the death of Amber Thurman, a Georgia mother featured Monday in an in-depth ProPublica report that said hers was the first time an abortion-related death officially deemed "preventable" has surfaced following the overturning of Roe v. Wade and subsequent enforcement of state abortion bans.
"This young mother should be alive, raising her son, and pursuing her dream of attending nursing school," Vice President Harris' statement said. "This is exactly what we feared when Roe was struck down."
Thurman, a 28-year-old mother of a 6-year-old boy, died in 2022. According to the ProPublica report, it was officially deemed preventable by a state committee due to a delay in care for a rare complication that occurred when she took abortion pills.
State abortion bans, Harris said Tuesday, "are preventing doctors from providing basic medical care."
"Women are bleeding out in parking lots, turned away from emergency rooms, losing their ability to ever have children again... and now women are dying," the vice president said.
At nine weeks pregnant, the ProPublica report lays out, Thurman had traveled to North Carolina for a scheduled surgical abortion but could not make it in time and was given the pills to terminate her pregnancy instead. Georgia's 2019 "heartbeat" law prohibits abortions after the point a fetal heartbeat can be detected, which is generally around six weeks. Medical professionals and women's health advocates have disputed that there is a sound scientific foundation for the "fetal heartbeat" concept as early as six weeks.
ProPublica's report notes that on July 20, 2022, when Georgia's law went into effect, Thurman had just passed the six-week mark where Georgia's law generally sets a boundary.
Georgia Republican Gov. Brian Kemp was a major supporter of the "heartbeat" legislation that became Georgia's LIFE Act. In a response to the report, a spokesman for Gov. Kemp, Garrison Douglas, defended the law and pointed to steps the governor has pushed in the state to improve maternal health, such as extending Medicaid coverage for mothers who've just given birth to six months and a $1 million pilot program to expand maternal health in rural communities.
“It is self-evident that dangerous misinformation places patients’ lives at risk, which is why getting the facts right is vitally important. Georgia’s LIFE Act not only expanded support for expectant mothers but also established clear exceptions, including providing necessary care in the event of a medical emergency," a statement from Douglas said. "In Georgia, we will always fight for and protect the lives of the most vulnerable among us."
Thurman had sought an abortion after learning she was pregnant with twins, the report states, because she wanted to maintain the stability she'd worked to establish as a single mother raising her son, with a recent move out of her family's home into an apartment and plans to soon enroll in nursing school.
Thurman experienced a complication with the pills in which all the fetal tissue had not been expelled from her body. The ProPublica report describes a routine procedure, a D&C (dilation and curettage) that would clear the tissue which she went to a metro Atlanta hospital to have performed.
Instead, she reportedly waited in a hospital bed as an infection spread and doctors took 20 hours to operate. She had told them her miscarriage was not spontaneous, but due to the abortion pills, exposing a potential legal uncertainty for the procedure where Georgia law prohibits a doctor using an instrument "with the purpose of terminating a pregnancy." In this case, while doctors would not have been terminating the pregnancy, the law only acknowledges the legality of removing a "dead unborn child" in a "naturally occurring" scenario.
The long delay in care for Thurman resulted in her death being officially deemed preventable by a Georgia Department of Public Health committee that reviews maternal mortality. Georgia has one of the highest rates for maternal mortality in the country, and it is disproportionately high for Black women.
Vice President Harris' statement on Tuesday blamed state abortion bans on former President Donald Trump, her opponent in the 2024 election, after his appointments as president established a new majority on the Supreme Court favorable to overturning Roe v. Wade.
"These are the consequences of Donald Trump’s actions," Harris said. "There is so much at stake in this election, including restoring the freedoms that have been taken away from us."
The statement went on to pledge that Harris, if president, would work to "pass a law to restore reproductive freedom."
Many other prominent Democrats, including Stacey Abrams in Georgia, highlighted Thurman's case and the ProPublica report after it was published on Monday.
The Center for Reproductive Rights said Thurman's doctors "knew how to perform the very basic medical procedure needed to save her life, but felt their hands were tied because of the state's abortion ban."