Did pro-choice lies kill Amber Thurman?

Vice President   Kamala Harris , along with most of her party, is blaming Thurman’s death on Georgia’s law banning the abortion of babies who have a heartbeat. This lie, originated by liberal outlet   ProPublica , is not only slander, it is also dangerous: It endangers the lives of other women who turn to the abortion pill to end their pregnancies.

Thurman, a single mother of a young boy, learned in the summer of 2022 that she was pregnant with twins. Concluding these children would disrupt “her newfound stability,”   ProPublica   explained , Thurman decided to abort them. When logistical problems derailed her plan of a surgical abortion, Thurman settled on a chemical abortion.

An abortion clinic in North Carolina gave her a mifepristone pill and sent her home with a second pill — misoprostol. These pills not only caused fetal demise — which is their purpose — they also killed Thurman.

The abortion pills killed Thurman because by killing her twins, they left her with two dead bodies inside her. Her body didn’t expel the entirety of their remains, and the result was sepsis, a common consequence of abortion pills.

Here’s how   ProPublica   described what happened to Thurman after her   abortion :

“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.”

The hospital, for reasons never explained in the   ProPublica   article, didn’t get around to removing the remains for 20 hours. The sepsis had advanced too far at that point, and it killed her on the operating table.

ProPublica   and   Democrats   assert that Thurman would have survived the consequences of her chemical abortion if not for the Georgia abortion law.

“Just that summer, her state had made performing the procedure a felony, with few exceptions,” the article states. “Any doctor who violated the new Georgia law could be   prosecuted   and face up to a decade in prison.”

The implication here is that Georgia’s law somehow prevented Piedmont Henry Hospital in Georgia from removing the remains of the dead Thurman twins from their mother. This is false.

It is not up for debate. It’s simply false.

There is no way to read Georgia’s law and believe that it bars a life-saving D&C of dead post-abortion human remains.

In 2019, Georgia Gov.   Brian Kemp   signed the LIFE Act, which banned most abortions after six weeks. When the   Dobbs   decision struck down   Roe v. Wade   in June 2022, the law — already on the books for three years — went into effect.

The law’s definition of abortion is limited to procedures that “cause the death of an unborn child.”

Facially, this law does not apply when the unborn children are already dead, as they were when Thurman showed up at the hospital. A D&C to remove fetal remains is always legal in Georgia, whether the unborn child was aborted or suffered from spontaneous miscarriage.

Further, the state’s abortion ban very clearly does not apply to situations “in which 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 of the pregnant woman.”

And so even if the twins were still alive, a D&C would have been legal because the doctors presumably knew Thurman was in danger of death or serious impairment.

This isn’t ambiguous. Everyone who studied the law knew these facts about it. Take it from the Abortion Defense Network,   whose briefing paper   on Georgia abortion law states:

“Georgia law allows abortions after fetal cardiac activity is detectable [approximately six weeks] in cases where a physician determines in their ‘reasonable medical judgment’ that there is a ‘medical emergency.’ ”

The Abortion Defense Network further states: “treatment for miscarriage where there is no cardiac activity (including medications, D&C, D&E [dilation and extraction], labor induction) are not abortions under Georgia law and thus are not prohibited by its abortion ban. Miscarriage care is legal, so long as there is no cardiac activity. With respect to self-managed abortion, it is legal for providers to give medical care during or after a self-managed abortion provided there is no cardiac activity.”

Georgia law clearly allowed the   hospital   to provide the D&C that Thurman needed and that   ProPublica   falsely stated was illegal. Why did the hospital wait 20 hours after she arrived to take her to the operating room?

That’s the central question in Thurman’s case. Digging deeper suggests the blame for Thurman’s death lies not with pro-life laws but with pro-choice lies.

Since the   Dobbs   decision leaked in May 2022, abortion advocates and the news   media   have claimed that state abortion laws outlaw all sorts of things that aren’t abortion.

Abortion bans, the pro-choice commentators and reporters insist, make it illegal to get care after a miscarriage, to deal with an ectopic pregnancy, or to end a pregnancy in order to save a mother’s life. This is not true. Every state with an abortion ban includes a life-of-the-mother exception. The other confusions, intentional or not, rely on blurring the definition of abortion.

Critics of pro-life laws sow confusion by using the term abortion to mean three different things:

• Deliberately and directly ending the life of an embryo or fetus.
• Spontaneous miscarriage.
• Removing an already dead embryo or fetus from a woman’s uterus.

(There’s a fourth common usage of the term, which is delivering a live baby before it is viable, thus indirectly ending its life.)

Those second and third definitions of abortion fit within standard technical   medical   usage, but they are well outside the ordinary usage of the term. While any woman who has suffered a miscarriage might see on her medical records the notation of “spontaneous abortion,” the political and moral debates about abortion all involve the deliberate termination of in-utero life.

Abortion bans do not ban miscarriage treatment, but the pro-choice commentators want you to believe that, because they want to repeal these laws and legalize the deliberate taking of preborn life.

They need you to believe that laws about live babies apply to dead babies.

Conflating   live babies   with dead babies has been central to the post- Roe   misinformation campaign. It’s fitting because the defense of abortion rests entirely on covering up the fact that what’s being terminated is a living girl or boy.

This is despicable not merely because it is false and dishonest, but because it could endanger pregnant women.

Did Thurman or her doctors believe, falsely, that Georgia’s law banned a post-abortion D&C? Did Thurman or her doctors believe that a life-saving D&C was illegal in Georgia?

That would explain why they didn’t move Thurman to the OR for 20 hours. If their mistake did cause her demise, then it’s not the fault of the Georgia law, which is unambiguous on these questions. It’s the fault of those who lied about abortion law.