As the battle over women’s rights is waged on America’s political battlefield, a Black woman has become the first reported casualty. Women’s rights advocates warned healthcare would be compromised if state-wide abortion bans went into effect. Now, we’re seeing this play out in real-time as doctors hesitate to provide life-saving care due to their fear of being held criminally liable. For instance, “at least two women in Georgia died after they couldn’t access legal abortions and timely medical care,” according to a ProPublica report. Amber Nicole Thurman, a 28-year-old Black mother and medical assistant, has been named as the first “preventable” death resulting from an abortion ban.
How did this tragedy happen? After taking abortion pills at home, Amber suffered a rare complication, as the fetal tissue did not naturally expel from her body. She sought help from doctors at the Piedmont Henry Hospital, where they could perform a dilation and curettage procedure. However, a new Georgia law characterized the procedure as a felony. Any doctor who provides abortion care in the state could serve up to a decade in prison. While the facility had well-trained staff, doctors there felt powerless to help. This is precisely what medical professionals warned would happen. Dr. Melissa Kottke, an OB-GYN, told state lawmakers in 2019 that doctors “would feel the need to wait for a higher blood pressure, wait for a higher fever — really got to justify this one — bleed a little more.” In other words, abortion bans would make doctors hesitate instead of focusing on providing quality care, and this could endanger women’s lives. And that’s precisely what happened in the case of Thurman.
In the hours leading up to her death, Amber shared concern for her 6-year-old son. As she waited for treatment, the infection continued to spread, compromising her organs. One of the most heartbreaking elements of the story is that Amber’s death was deemed “preventable” by Georgia’s maternal mortality review committee. A group of experts, including ten doctors, reviewed patient care data and found the hospital’s decision to delay the procedure had a “large” impact on her death. Doctors waited 20 hours, almost a day, to operate. Sadly, by then, the procedure was too late to save her life. While ProPublica uncovered the stories of two women who have died following Georgia’s abortion ban, reporter Kavitha Surana noted they are likely many more. Amber’s case shows why abortion bans are dangerous — they make doctors weigh their careers and freedom against their professional oath to save lives.
In Georgia, the maternal mortality rate is “almost twice the national rate,” and Black women are nearly three times as likely to die compared with White women. However, researchers suggest many of these deaths are preventable. Amber was physically healthy before the complication and would likely still be alive if doctors hadn’t waited so long to operate. The fact that a Black woman has become the first documented casualty of abortion bans is significant given the legacy of racial discrimination targeting Black women.
James Marion Sims, the so-called “father of modern gynecology,” conducted painful experiments on enslaved Black women throughout the 1840s without their consent or the use of anesthesia. Thus, the development of this specialty originated from an unfair tradeoff, where a doctor sought to expand medical knowledge while disregarding the humanity of Black women. It’s a tragic irony that doctors knew how to save Amber but refused to do so. And it’s reminiscent of the medical racism that launched the field of gynecology in the first place. Abortion bans put doctors between a rock and a hard place, as some feel they need to wait until a woman is on the brink of death before rendering aid to justify any actions they take to save her life. However, beyond considerations for a doctor’s career, one mustn’t forget women are the ones whose lives are on the line.
The fact that doctors in states where abortion bans are in effect feel unsure of how to proceed and are waiting until women are in critical condition to perform life-saving care puts their lives in jeopardy. Of course, there is no quick fix to this social problem, as Georgia doctors who deny care to women will likely continue to do so to follow the law. It’s also a reminder that not all women have the money and social support to leave the state they live in to seek reproductive healthcare. While some believed women would be able to mitigate the fallout by traveling to another state or acquiring abortion pills they could take at home, Thurman’s death dispels the myth that this strategy is a viable solution to the systemic problem. Only federal legislation securing women’s rights could correct the injustice.
In a statement about Thurman’s death, V.P. Kamala Harris said, “This young mother should be alive, raising her son, and pursuing her dream of attending nursing schoo.” She added: “Women are bleeding out in parking lots, turned away from emergency rooms, losing their ability to ever have children again. Survivors of rape and incest are being told they cannot make decisions about what happens next to their bodies. And now women are dying. These are the consequences of Donald Trump’s actions.”
Harris is referring to Trump’s role of stacking the Supreme Court with conservative justices who struck down Roe v. Wade. While some Republicans support a national ban, the former president has supported a “your state, your decision” policy. Those who study the chattel slavery era will see the problem here — of states individually being able to extend or retract citizens’ rights at will.
To those who are locked into the topic of women’s reproductive rights, the death of women resulting from abortion bans was expected. As Mini Timmaraju, the president of Reproductive Freedom for All, said, “We actually have the substantiated proof of something we already knew that abortion bans can kill people.” Given that pregnancy-related deaths disproportionately impact Black women, it could even be expected they would be among the first casualties. However, this is fresh news for some, something they never considered or believed would happen. The real question is what we do about this social problem. Will states stay the course despite women dying, offer clarity to medical professionals on when they can intervene, or pass laws securing women’s reproductive rights? Since medical professionals deemed Amber's death preventable, we have a collective responsibility to consider the danger of abortion bans and how they add an unnecessary layer of complexity to patient care that endangers lives.
This post originally appeared on Medium and is edited and republished with author's permission. Read more of Allison Gaines' work on Medium.