Columnist Michelle Goldberg declared in a New York Times opinion piece on Monday, “It Was Only a Matter of Time Before Abortion Bans Killed Someone.” She blamed the law. She’s wrong.
Goldberg details the story of Georgia resident Amber Nicole Thurman and her unborn twins, who died on August 19, 2022, after Thurman attempted a chemical abortion without medical supervision.
The villain in Goldberg’s telling is Georgia’s “Living Infants Fairness and Equity Act,” which states that “no abortion shall be performed if the unborn child has a detectable human heartbeat.”
Thurman attempted to procure an abortion in Georgia, but her children’s heartbeats prevented her. She drove hours to a clinic in North Carolina, which refused her surgical abortion but offered her the chemical abortion drugs mifepristone and misoprostol to bring back home. She did so and suffered complications, and her local doctors delayed treatment until it was too late to save her. The twins were already dead.
Investigating Thurman’s death, doctors and lawyers concluded it had been “entirely preventable.”
Goldberg writes, “The complications Thurman faced didn’t have to be deadly; a timely medical intervention could have saved her life.” Then she blames the law: “[A]s long as abortion bans persist, more women are likely to die the same way.”
The villain in this tale, however, is not the so-called “abortion ban.” It’s the Food and Drug Administration, the clinic, and the doctors.
The abortion pills that Goldberg touts as “safer than penicillin” were rushed through the FDA approval process in 2000. The FDA classified mifepristone and misoprostol under “Subpart H—Accelerated Approval of New Drugs for Serious or Life-Threatening Illnesses.”
By classifying pregnancy as a “life-threatening illness,” the FDA was able to tout the abortion cocktail as “safe” with the promise that it would carefully monitor the drug’s use and outcomes for the mothers.
The data weren’t good. Multiple studies emerged by 2015 that showed the drug regimen is anything but safe. As many as one in five mothers required follow-up medical help after taking the mifepristone/misoprostol cocktail. Another study of Medicaid records showed that in states that fund abortion for low-income women, “the rate of chemical abortion-related emergency room visits increased over 500% between 2022 – 2015.”
The response from the FDA was criminal. Instead of ordering more studies, in 2016 the FDA eliminated the requirement that prescribing doctors track adverse effects. It also reduced the number of in-person medical visits from three to one and allowed non-doctors to prescribe the drugs.
Those safeguards, while ensuring the death of her twins, could have at least saved Thurman’s life.
In 2023, 63% of abortions in the United States occurred when women ingested these drugs. Over 642,700 unborn children died from medication abortions that year. At a 15% rate, nearly 100,000 women hemorrhaged while undergoing the abortion.
The clinic in North Carolina, while technically following the FDA regulations surrounding chemical abortion, certainly bears responsibility for dispensing a drug with a known track record for putting women in emergency rooms to a woman from so far away.
Once Thurman was back in Georgia and suffering from an infection, doctors should have immediately treated her to save her life. Goldberg reports: “She needed a D.&C., a procedure to empty the uterus, but doctors waited 20 hours to operate as her blood pressure sank, and her organs began to fail.”
There is no state in America that bans a dilation and curettage procedure in the case of a medical emergency or to remove “a dead unborn child.” In fact, what Goldberg calls “cruel” pro-life laws require doctors to exercise their “good faith” and “reasonable” medical judgment in the case of pregnancy-related emergencies.
Section 4 of the Georgia law, in this case, states that surgical intervention “shall not be considered an abortion if the act is performed with the purpose of (A) removing a dead unborn child caused by spontaneous abortion; or (B) Removing an ectopic pregnancy,” or in the case of a medical emergency “to prevent the death of the pregnant woman [or substantial impairment].”
The law could not be clearer. The doctors to whom she appealed were negligent. At best, they abdicated their responsibility to inform themselves and instead listened to misinformation from legacy media outlets such as Goldberg’s New York Times.
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Goldberg writes: “The complications Thurman faced didn’t have to be deadly; a timely medical intervention could have saved her life. And as long as abortion bans persist, more women are likely to die the same way.”
In fact, as long as misinformation from activist journalists persists, more women and their infants will die.
Erika Ahern is a journalist, staff writer, and podcast co-host for CatholicVote.