Vice President Kamala Harris will return to Atlanta on Friday to highlight her support for expanded abortion rights and link the deaths of two Georgia women who died after complications from abortion pills to former President Donald Trump’s policies.
A Harris official said the Democratic nominee plans to address the deaths of Amber Thurman and Candi Miller, both of whom died shortly after Georgia’s anti-abortion limits took effect following the 2022 U.S. Supreme Court decision to overturn the constitutional right to abortion.
Democrats are intensifying their focus on GOP positions on abortion as November nears, with polls in Georgia and other battleground states showing broad support for expanding access to the procedure.
An Atlanta Journal-Constitution poll released Wednesday shows Harris and Trump are neck-and-neck in Georgia, a state Republicans see as a linchpin in their 2024 strategy. Roughly 1 in 10 likely Georgia voters see abortion as the “biggest influence” on their vote.
Anti-abortion advocates say the deaths are tragic, but say the abortion pills the women used to terminate their pregnancies — and, in one instance, the negligence of medical providers — are what caused the deaths.
Thurman, whose death was first reported by ProPublica, died after waiting 20 hours for a hospital for treatment. Harris has said her death is the consequence of Trump’s anti-abortion stance. He appointed three U.S. Supreme Court justices who helped overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022. Trump now argues that states should have the final say on abortion laws.
When Gov. Brian Kemp signed the bill in 2019, he kept a campaign promise to pass one of the strictest abortion laws in the country.
“All life has value, all life matters and all life is worthy of protection,” he said at the time.
Kemp spokesman Garrison Douglas said the exceptions put in place under Georgia law should have prevented the deaths of Thurman and Miller.
“It is self-evident that dangerous misinformation places patients’ lives at risk, which is why getting the facts right is vitally important,” he said. “Georgia’s (abortion law) not only expanded support for expectant mothers but also established clear exceptions, including providing necessary care in the event of a medical emergency.”
Georgia’s law bans most abortions once a doctor can detect fetal cardiac activity, typically about six weeks into a pregnancy and before many know they are pregnant.
But some medical experts and abortion rights advocates say Georgia’s law does not clearly outline when an abortion is “necessary in order to prevent the death of the pregnant woman or the substantial and irreversible physical impairment of a major bodily function,” as allowed under the law. Some doctors warned lawmakers when the bill was being debated that there are no medical definitions that align with that exception.
“This young mother should be alive, raising her son, and pursuing her dream of attending nursing school,” Harris said of Thurman in a statement earlier this week.
“Women are bleeding out in parking lots, turned away from emergency rooms, losing their ability to ever have children again. Survivors of rape and incest are being told they cannot make decisions about what happens next to their bodies. And now women are dying,” she said. “These are the consequences of Donald Trump’s actions.”
Trump’s campaign said earlier this week that the hospital should have provided lifesaving treatment, and highlighted the Republican nominee’s support for exceptions to abortion limits written into Georgia’s law for rape, incest and the life of the mother.
“With those exceptions in place,” said Trump spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt, “it’s unclear why doctors did not swiftly act to protect Amber Thurman’s life.”
Credit: Arvin Temkar/AJC
Credit: Arvin Temkar/AJC
State Sen. Ed Setzler, an Acworth Republican who sponsored the 2019 abortion bill, called Thurman’s death a tragedy. He had not yet read the ProPublica piece about Miller.
“This young mother was killed by a nine-week chemical abortion that Georgia banned in 2019 because it is dangerous for women and deadly for their children,” he said. “Georgia’s law gave these shamefully unprepared doctors every legal tool they needed to save this mother’s life.”
According to the ProPublica report, Thurman sought the hospital’s help after traveling to North Carolina and taking an abortion pill in 2022. She was about nine weeks pregnant with twins at the time. When the abortion didn’t complete, Thurman developed sepsis. Twenty hours after she arrived at the emergency room in Henry County, her heart stopped on the operating table, ProPublica reported.
Thurman’s death took place two weeks after Georgia’s anti-abortion law took effect in 2022.
Senate Majority Leader Steve Gooch of Dahlonega said exceptions in the law should have allowed Thurman to get the procedure she needed to save her life. Many of the issues highlighted in the ProPublica series could be addressed through better educating the public, he said.
“Maybe there’s a lack of knowledge and more education is needed, especially for young women, that may not know what laws do exist,” Gooch, a Republican, said. “And I would hope that (medical professionals) are studying and being kept up to date on all the new laws and proposed changes to the laws. But it would make sense to encourage them.”
In a news call Monday after the first ProPublica article published, Krystal Redman, executive director of abortion-rights group SPARK Reproductive Justice NOW, said Thurman’s death was another symptom of the racism in health care that leads to Black women in Georgia being three times more likely than white women to die from pregnancy and childbirth-related issues. Both Thurman and Miller were Black.
Georgia also has consistently had one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the country. The news call was held before the ProPublica article about Miller published.
“We know Amber Nicole Thurman died as a result of medical negligence,” she said. “Amber’s death reflects a larger pattern of reproductive injustices, where laws, policies and health care systems continue to deny Black people the dignity and care we deserve.”
In the years since the overturning of Roe v. Wade, anti-abortion activists have set their sights on one of the two pills used to have an abortion. The U.S. Supreme Court earlier this year overturned a lower-court ruling that banned the use of mifepristone, the first in a two-pill series used to terminate pregnancies, allowing continued use of the pill.
Mifepristone, first approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2000, is one of two drugs used in medication abortions, which account for more than half of all abortions in the United States. Anti-abortion advocates had challenged the FDA’s approval of the medication.
In 2021, the FDA issued guidance allowing abortion medication to be prescribed through the mail following a telehealth visit.
Georgia providers say they don’t use telehealth for abortion visits. Georgia’s abortion laws also require an ultrasound to determine how far along a pregnancy is before an abortion — medical or surgical — can be performed. The ultrasound requires an in-person visit.
The two-pill combination has become the most-used method for those seeking an abortion in Georgia. The pills are approved for use up to about 10 weeks, though very few abortions are performed in Georgia after about five weeks of pregnancy due to the state’s law.
State lawmakers in recent years have unsuccessfully tried to ban Georgians from receiving abortion pills in the mail. Opponents of the effort say there would be no way to enforce such a ban.
A second ProPublica article published on Wednesday documented the death of Miller, a 41-year-old mother of three who also died in the months after Georgia’s abortion ban took place.
Doctors told Miller she might not survive another pregnancy after giving birth to her youngest child three years prior, family members told ProPublica, so when she learned she was pregnant, she ordered abortion pills online from overseas and tried to terminate her pregnancy at home.
Miller’s family said she was afraid of going to doctors for help once it was clear the abortion was incomplete. She died at home a few days later.
Credit: Hyosub Shin/AJC
Credit: Hyosub Shin/AJC
