The 100-Year Life Health Education and Government
On Friday, Kamala Harris led a crowd of supporters in Atlanta to say the name Amber Nicole Thurman. Thurman was a 28-year-old Black woman who died in a Georgia hospital in 2022 following complications from a medical abortion. Her death, first reported by ProPublica, was found to be “preventable” since doctors waited to provide routine, life-saving treatment – apparently because of the risk they could be prosecuted. Georgia introduced a six-week abortion ban that summer, after the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade. “There is a word, preventable, and there is another word, predictable,” Harris said. Thurman’s death is the first to be publicly linked to post-Roe abortion bans. It’s unlikely to be the last. But understanding the full impact of abortion bans relies on state-led reviews, which often (like Thurman’s) have a two-year time lag if they happen at all. In Idaho, which has some of the most restrictive abortion laws in the country, the state committee that provided reviews of pregnancy-related deaths was disbanded in 2023. Fears of prosecution in Idaho have led to an exodus of practising obstetricians and forced the state’s largest hospital to air-lift mothers out of state for emergency care.
