By Randall K. O’Bannon, Ph.D., NRL Director of Education & Research
Pro-abortion Vice President Kamala Harris and her pro-abortion running mate Governor Tim Walz have drawn a lot of attention to the tragic case of Amber Thurman, a Georgia woman who died in 2022 after the unsuccessful treatment of complications from her chemical abortion.
In their telling, Thurman died because the state of Georgia would not let her get an abortion in state and stood in the way of treating her complications by raising questions about the legality of the procedure to remove dead tissue from her uterus.
An attorney for the family is not suing the state, but rather the doctors and the hospital for allegedly not treating her quickly enough.
Background on abortion pill death
Thurman, 28-years old, pregnant with twins at nine-weeks’ gestation, sought a surgical abortion in North Carolina because she was past the six-week deadline set by Georgia’s newly passed “Heartbeat Law.” When she arrived late to her appointment, the clinic talked her into abortion pills, which she took and returned home.
Experiencing severe pain, vomiting, and bleeding several days later, she sought help at her local hospital, the Piedmont Henry Hospital in Stockbridge, Georgia.
Though doctors there began talking about an emergency D&C (dilation and curettage) to remove the remaining dead tissue (the babies would have already perished) — a procedure fully allowed under Georgia law–they delayed surgery until the following afternoon. She died on the operating table.
It is unclear how much was known or made public at the time, but attention was drawn to Thurman’s story by Pro-Publica published September 16th. That article never said directly but left the implication that the delay in treating Thurman was due to doctors waiting for some legal ruling from the hospital saying the D&C could be performed under state law.
It is unclear whether any legal concern was actually a factor in the delay. Some articles speak as if there was some argument among doctors or administrators as to whether the law allowed a D&C to remove the dead tissue (Fox5 Atlanta, 10/2/24, The Independent, 10/2/24). But what also seems likely is that the doctors took too much time to get the surgeon and operating team lined up.
This is what was responsible for Thurman’s deteriorating condition becoming irreversible.
Harris camp blames Trump, state law
This did not stop the Harris campaign from trying to use the case to attack the Georgia law and blame Trump for facilitating that change by his appointments to the Supreme Court which overturned Roe in 2022.
“This young mother should be alive, raising her son, and pursuing her dream of attending nursing school,” Harris said in a statement released to the press. “This is exactly what we feared when Roe was struck down.” Making clear who she considered at fault, Harris said. “These are the consequences of Donald Trump’s actions.” (The Guardian, 9/17/24)
Harris raised the issue at a campaign speech in Georgia in September, saying that Thurman was dead because of “Trump abortion bans.” As Harris told it, “Amber waited 20 hours – 20 excruciating hours – until finally she was in enough physical distress that her doctors thought they would be OK to treat her. But it was too late. She died of sepsis.”
Harris said “we knew this could happen” when the Court struck down Roe v. Wade (USA Today, 9/2024)
Harris’ running mate Walz continued to push this false narrative when he was interviewed by Shannon Bream of Fox News for an October 6 broadcast. He said, “states like Georgia force women to cross the border and then we have a death of Amber Thurman.”
But Bream fact-checked Walz. She pointed out that Thurman died from complications with the abortion pill and that her family’s attorney blamed the hospital for failing to address the complications in a timely fashion.
Hospital failed to follow law
There are conflicting stories as to whether and to what degree Thurman’s family thought Georgia’s heartbeat law was primarily culpable in her death.
A statement issued by family attorney Ben Crump said, “Amber’s tragic death was a direct result of Georgia’s archaic and dangerously restrictive abortion laws, which denied her the life-saving care she so desperately needed” (Newsweek, 10/2/24)
At the same time, Spectrum News NY1 says that attorney “blamed doctors, not the law, for Thurman’s death” (10/1/24)
Perhaps the family, befriended (and exploited?) by the Harris and Walz campaign are reluctant to challenge their narrative. But the lawsuit appears to target the hospital and doctors rather than the state law or government.
But Georgia’s law never stood in the way of treating Thurman’s complications.
Georgia attorney Michael Harper told The Independent that Thurman would have qualified for not one, but two exceptions laid out in Georgia’s “heartbeat” law. The Georgia law allows abortion if either the doctor determines there is a medical emergency or if the child is already dead — both of which were true (and readily obvious) in Thurman’s case. “There should have been no confusion,” Harper told the newspaper (The Independent, 10/2/24).
In the Spectrum News story, Crump, the family attorney, agreed. “Even under Georgia law, the doctors had a duty to act to save Amber,” Crump said. “She had taken the abortion pills and there were tissues left. There was no viable fetus or anything that would have prevented them from saving her life while she suffered.”
If so, the law was not the reason for the delay, as it allowed immediate treatment of Thurman’s complications.
“You have a duty to stabilize her and then give her the option to go to another hospital facility,” Crump said. “But you cannot let her suffer and die on your hospital bed when the death is preventable” (Spectrum News NY1, 10/1/24).
Culpability really belongs to Biden-Harris
As we pointed out here, however negligent the hospital and its doctors might have been, the real reason Amber Thurman died was that she took a dangerous drug which triggered an incomplete abortion, bleeding, and other complications which ultimately took her life and the lives of her unborn children.
Mifepristone, the abortion drug, was approved under the Clinton administration and ultimately made more broadly available with reduced restrictions under Obama and Biden-Harris.
Thurman could not have received those pills under the original 2000 protocol, limiting the use of mifepristone and misoprostol to just seven weeks after a woman’s last menstrual period (LMP). From the beginning, testing had shown that the abortion pill’s efficacy declined the farther along the gestation and with that decline also came increased complications.
Thurman was nine weeks LMP, a gestational age not allowed until 2016 when Obama-Biden, at the behest of the abortion industry, pushed the limit to 10 weeks.
One of the reasons that Thurman did not get the help she needed when she needed it was because it appears that there was no timely follow up by the health care personnel who prescribed her pills.
Even after Obama-Biden eased regulations, prescribers were still supposed to meet directly with patients and expected to at least check in with them to ensure everything was going as planned and to have made arrangements for any emergencies that might arise.
After the Biden-Harris administration came along, there was no required in-person meeting, exam, or screening between patient and prescriber, and it became the patient’s responsibility, not the prescriber’s, to monitor for problems and seek emergency help if needed.
The tragic consequence of these relaxed regulations and reduced safeguards can be seen all too clearly in the case of Amber Thurman.
She wouldn’t have been prescribed the dangerous abortion pills under the original mifepristone protocol. She took the pills, began to bleed, but didn’t get help until her situation had become critical. It isn’t clear whether her doctors completely understood what the abortion pills were doing to her body and how quickly they needed to act.
Contrary to the Harris-Walz allegations, everything in the Georgia Law was geared towards saving Amber Thurman’s life.
Everything the Harris-Biden team did to make abortion pills more available made her death more likely.
