Kamala Harris on Tuesday blamed Donald Trump’s policies and condemned the state’s abortion ban, after it emerged that a Georgia woman had died after being denied timely medical care due to the state’s restrictive abortion ban.
Harris’ comments followed research published by ProPublica on Monday, detailing the circumstances surrounding the 2022 death of Amber Nicole Thurman, a Georgia medical assistant. The outlet called the case the first “preventable” abortion-related death to be confirmed, and said it would report a second in the coming days.
“These are the consequences of Donald Trump’s actions,” Harris said in a statement. Georgia’s six-week abortion ban went into effect shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022.
Thurman died after developing a rare complication from abortion pills. Days after taking the pills, she was rushed to the emergency room with heavy bleeding because she had not yet removed all of the fetal tissue from her body. According to the report, doctors disagreed on her treatment and waited 20 hours to perform a routine procedure. Thurman, who was 28 and the mother of a 6-year-old boy, died during emergency surgery.
“This young mother should be alive, raising her son, pursuing her dream of going to nursing school,” said Harris, who has made abortion rights a prominent part of her presidential campaign. “This is exactly what we feared when Roe was struck down.”
In Georgia, performing an abortion after six weeks of pregnancy is a felony. While the law allows for exceptions to save a pregnant woman’s life, doctors say the wording is too vague to work in practice.
Since 2022, more than 20 states have enacted abortion bans and restrictions.
After Thurman’s death, a state medical review board ruled that her death “could have been prevented” and that there was a “strong likelihood” she would have survived if she had undergone the procedure sooner, ProPublica reported.
ProPublica reported that Thurman became pregnant shortly after Georgia’s six-week abortion ban went into effect and that her pregnancy had just passed that limit.
Thurman planned a procedure known as dilation and curettage, or D&C, She was in North Carolina on Aug. 13, traveling there with her best friend, ProPublica reported. She had found a sitter and scheduled a day off.
However, her best friend told ProPublica that there was a lot of traffic in the driveway and the clinic could not hold Thurman’s spot for more than 15 minutes.
As a result, Thurman was given a U.S. Food and Drug Administration-approved two-pill abortion drug, including mifepristone and misoprostol, because her pregnancy far exceeded the standard of care for that treatment.
Medication-assisted abortion is the most common way to terminate a pregnancy in the US, and deaths from complications are extremely rare.
ProPublica reported that Thurman was given instructions at the North Carolina clinic on how to take the pills safely and to go to the emergency room if any complications occurred.
She took the first pill at the clinic and drove home before the symptoms started. The next day she took the second pill as prescribed.
At first she only suffered from cramps, but after a few days her condition worsened with vomiting and heavy bleeding.
If she had lived near the clinic in North Carolina, she would have gotten a free curettage immediately after the follow-up exam, the director there told ProPublica. But Thurman was about a four-hour drive away.
Thurman lost consciousness and was taken to a hospital in a suburb of Atlanta with a serious infection. Thurman needed a curettage, but the surgery was delayed for about 20 hours because her blood pressure dropped and her organs began to fail, ProPublica reported.
The report states that she was diagnosed with “acute severe sepsis” the next morning. But even then, no curettage was performed.
About 20 hours after she arrived at the hospital, the doctor performed the D&C and discovered that a hysterectomy was also necessary. Thurman’s heart stopped during the procedure.
The Georgia Maternal Mortality Review Board found there was a “significant likelihood” that Thurman’s death could have been prevented if the curettage had been performed sooner.
Before her death, Thurman had planned to enroll in nursing school, her friend told ProPublica. She and her child had recently moved out of her family’s home and into their own apartment.
Thurman’s last words to her mother before she died were, “Promise me you’ll take care of my son,” the outlet reported.
To research have shown that the availability of the D&C procedure for abortions and miscarriage care in the year after Roe v. Wade was passed in 1973 reduced the death rate among mothers of color by 40%.
But since more than 20 states have banned or restricted abortions in the past two years, women with medical complications are repeatedly being turned away from emergency rooms.
“Women are bleeding to death in parking lots, being turned away from emergency rooms, losing their ability to ever have children again,” Harris’ statement said. “Survivors of rape and incest are told they can’t make decisions about what happens to their bodies. And now women are dying.”
As president, Trump appointed three conservative Supreme Court justices who were instrumental in overturning Roe. And as a candidate, he has alternately bragged about his role in overturning Roe v. Wade and complained that Republican extremism on the issue could cost them the election.
“If Donald Trump gets the chance, he will sign a nationwide abortion ban, and these horrible realities will multiply,” Harris said. “We need to pass a bill to restore reproductive freedom. If I am president of the United States, I will proudly sign it. Lives depend on it.”
Mini Timmaraju, the chairman of Naral Pro-Choice America, said in a press conference Monday that Thurman’s death “substantiated evidence of something we already knew – that abortion bans are killing people and that this cannot continue.”
Regina Davis Moss, the CEO of In Our Own Voice: National Black Women’s Reproductive Justice Agenda, said in a statement that what happened to Thurman was “completely preventable,” adding that this is the “post-Dobbs reality for many Black women, girls, and people of diverse gender perspectives.”
Moss too a study noted who estimated that if abortion were banned in every state, there could be a “staggering” 39% increase in maternal deaths among black women.
Lauren Gambino contributed to this report