Georgia's abortion ban killed a young mother. The Christian right now blames the victim

Pro-choice activists warned in the immediate aftermath of Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health that the subsequent cascade of abortion bans would kill women. Two years after the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade, we're not finding out that it didn't take long. Amber Nicole Thurman, 28, died on August 19, 2022, less than a month after Georgia passed its draconian abortion law that banned the treatment that could have saved her life. While the doctors and nurses tasked with her care did not speak to ProPublica, who first reported on this death this week, a 10-member committee set up to examine maternal mortality cases has deemed Thurman's death "preventable," and ruled she would have likely lived if doctors had used the protocols that had been in place before the Georgia law made them a felony.

But Republicans and Christian right activists don't want to take responsibility for the loss of this healthy young mother of a 6-year-old boy. Instead, they're casting blame on everyone else: the doctors in the Georgia hospital, abortion providers in North Carolina, and, though they will deny doing so, they're blaming Thurman herself. Thurman chose abortion. They're blaming her choice for her death.

In her rant on Twitter about it, anti-choice activist Lila Rose repeatedly emphasized how she believes Thurman did this to herself, declaring she "died from sepsis after taking legally obtained abortion pills." Acknowledging that Thurman "sought out an abortion" and traveled to North Carolina for the pills, Rose insists, "Abortion killed Amber Thurman. Abortion killed Amber's twin babies." She also blames Thurman for waiting "days before seeking medical care." While Rose will pretend otherwise, the victim-blaming is not subtle.

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Rose's finger-pointing is dishonest to a grotesque extreme. Thurman's death is not due to her choice to take medication abortion, which has a mortality rate of .0003%, which is 1 in every 377,000 cases. (Out of 377,000 women who give birth, in contrast, 83 will die.) Thurman, as the report makes clear, would have almost certainly survived if she had received the pre-Dobbs standard of care, which is an immediate removal of an incomplete miscarriage. But Georgia's law, as written, makes this a felony. As ProPublica explained:

It prohibits doctors from using any instrument “with the purpose of terminating a pregnancy.” While removing fetal tissue is not terminating a pregnancy, medically speaking, the law only specifies it’s not considered an abortion to remove “a dead unborn child” that resulted from a “spontaneous abortion” defined as “naturally occurring” from a miscarriage or a stillbirth.

Anti-choicers are lying about this, so here is a link to the bill. As anyone can see, no exception is made to cover emergency care for a woman who deliberately induced her own miscarriage. Abortion opponents are insisting the doctors would not have gotten in legal trouble for saving Thurman's life. However, this is not how the law is written. But even if it was, doctors still had every reason to be afraid. If Thurman had received timely medical care and survived, a right-wing prosecutor could argue she wasn't that sick to begin with. That's the double bind of these supposed "exceptions."

Rose is far from the only one shifting the blame from Republican legislators to the deceased victim. SBA Pro-Life insisted "this tragedy began with abortion drugs" and lamented that Thurman's "twins deserved better," ignoring that Thurman did not want to have twins. The American Association of Pro Life OBGYNs claimed the "drugs were the root cause" of her death, even though it would have been safe to take these drugs in a state where abortion was not banned. Katie Glenn Daniel of SBA Prolife tweeted, "She and her twins should be here today," again implying that Thurman did something wrong by not wanting to give birth at this point in her life.

Of course, anti-choice activists deny that they're blaming Thurman for her death. They pretend to blame the "abortion industry," which they paint as forcing abortion on women. This argument assumes women are too stupid to make choices about their bodies. In this case, it's adding insult to injury. It's clear from the reporting that Thurman was smart and capable. She wasn't a passive vessel controlled by the mythical "abortion industry." She followed the news, hoping abortion advocates would get an injunction on the ban quickly. When that didn't happen, she scheduled an appointment in North Carolina, took time off work, got a babysitter, and marched through a crowd of anti-abortion protesters. Even the most diehard skeptic of female autonomy will struggle to deny that this is a story of a woman taking charge of her life.

The Christian right contempt for Thurman is not hard to spot. Kristan Hawkins of Students for Life sneered, "A woman pregnant WITH TWINS took Chemical Abortion Pills," which is clearly meant to demonize Thurman. That's the general tone across the anti-choice efforts to spin this case. They ping-pong between insinuating Thurman was a bad person for not wanting to have twins and suggesting she was too dumb to understand what abortion even is. At no point is there an understanding that she was a person who made a perfectly rational choice for herself and her family, and persevered despite misogynist lawmakers trying to stop her.

Now there's a second story from the same batch of Georgia reporting at ProPublica. Candi Miller, a 41-year-old mother of three, had been told by doctors that "having another baby could kill her." Miller "had lupus, diabetes and hypertension and didn’t want to wait until the situation became dire." She took abortion pills ordered online, but, like Thurman, had an incomplete abortion. In pre-Dobbs Georgia, this would not be a problem, because she could go to the emergency room and walk out a few hours, safe and pregnancy-free. Instead, she died in bed, afraid and in pain. The state committee that reviewed her case "immediately decided it was 'preventable' and blamed the state’s abortion ban."

The Christian right spinning on Miller's death is just as disgusting. The American Association of Pro Life OBGYNs flat-out lied, declaring doctors in Georgia could "help if her pregnancy threatens her life." This is false. As ProPublica points out, the Georgia law's "life of the mother" exception is exceedingly narrow and limited to acute emergencies. Miller's conditions were chronic. Miller was smart to want to abort her pregnancy before it got to the point where she was near death. Anti-abortion activists talk about her like she didn't understand the situation, when in fact, she understood perfectly well that the law wouldn't allow her a legal abortion until severe and likely irreversible damage had been done to her already fragile body.

The same anti-abortion activists insisting they'd honor these phony "exceptions" to abortion law are also currently pumping out endless propaganda insisting that women who have medically indicated abortions are liars. They especially hate Kate Cox, a Texas woman who had to travel out of state to abort a pregnancy because the fetus had a rare genetic disorder that usually kills the baby within a few days of birth. Cox's health was also imperiled, but because, like Miller, she hadn't yet reached death's door, the doctors couldn't legally justify it. Unlike Miller, Cox got a legal and medically supervised abortion and survived. Her reward is she is now subject to relentless lies from anti-abortion groups denying that her abortion was medically necessary.

That's the bind the Christian right puts women in. If you die, they say it's your fault for not having faith in the "exceptions." If you complete your abortion and live, they accuse you of being a liar and a murderer and insist the exceptions should not have covered you. As we see in these two cases, not only will conservatives pass laws that kill women, they will defame them in death by painting them as reckless and stupid. However, anyone who reads Miller and Thurman's stories can see that they made the smartest decisions they could have made under impossible circumstances.

Republicans always knew abortion bans would kill women. They just don't care. Donald Trump's running mate, Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, has made it quite clear with his relentless ranting about "miserable" and "sociopathic" women who are childless "cat ladies." The Christian right believes that women's purpose on earth is to make babies. In this view, any woman who declines a pregnancy — whether out of choice or necessity — has no right to exist.