Abortion Bans Have Delayed Emergency Medical Care. In Georgia, Experts Say This Mother’s Death Was Preventable.
In her final hours, Amber Nicole Thurman suffered from a grave infection that her suburban Atlanta hospital was well-equipped to treat.
She’d taken abortion pills and encountered a rare complication; she had not expelled all of the fetal tissue from her body. She showed up at Piedmont Henry Hospital in need of a routine procedure to clear it from her uterus, called a dilation and curettage, or D&C.
But just that summer, her state had made performing the procedure a felony, with few exceptions. Any doctor who violated the new Georgia law could be prosecuted and face up to a decade in prison.
Thurman waited in pain in a hospital bed, worried about what would happen to her 6-year-old son, as doctors monitored her infection spreading, her blood pressure sinking and her organs beginning to fail.
It took 20 hours for doctors to finally operate. By then, it was too late.
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She already had a 6-year-old son, and decided that she could not raise two more children. But she couldn’t get a termination in her home state. And so she scheduled a surgical abortion in North Carolina, took a day off work, hired a babysitter, borrowed a relative’s car on a false pretext, and got up at 4 a.m. to drive four hours with a friend to the clinic. But they hit traffic, and Thurman missed her appointment. The clinic could not give her another time slot, because so many women from out of state, also facing tough new laws, were booked on that day.
So Thurman was offered abortion pills instead. These are widely used and overwhelmingly safe and effective for early pregnancies. In less than 5 percent of cases, though, women need another dose, or a procedure called a dilation and curettage (D&C), to empty the uterus completely. In countries and states where abortion is legal, this is a simple and routine procedure that carries little risk.
But not in Georgia. Back home, Thurman’s bleeding would not stop. She went to the hospital at 6:51 p.m. on August 18, and medical examinations showed all the classic signs that her abortion was incomplete, and that the tissue remaining inside her was poisoning her blood. But doctors did not give her a D&C. Nor did they do so the next morning, as her condition continued to worsen. When she was finally taken to the operating theater, at 2 p.m., her condition was so bad that doctors started to remove her bowel and uterus.
But it was too late. Thurman’s heart stopped on the operating table.