Amber Thurman became the symbol of preventable deaths due to lack of access to abortion in the United States.
The 28-year-old woman was a single mother of a 6-year-old boy. When she became pregnant for the second time, she was expecting twins.
Thurman had just moved with her son to a new apartment and was planning to study nursing. Having more children was not in her plans, so she decided to terminate her second pregnancy.
Although she attempted to have an abortion in Georgia, the southern US state where she lived, local prohibitions against terminating a pregnancy prevented her from doing so.
Since The United States Supreme Court repealed constitutional protection of abortion In June 2022, each state assumed the responsibility of legislating on access to this reproductive health service.
Georgia became one of the states with the greatest barriers against abortionby approving a law that allows the procedure until the sixth week of gestation, when many women still do not even know that they are pregnant.
In this way, Georgia joined the desert of access to abortion services that was established in the southern United Stateswith at least 14 states in that area banning pregnancy termination almost entirely or with few exceptions.
The new regulations in Georgia came into effect just as Thurman crossed the threshold of the sixth week of gestation.
From that moment on, she would only have been able to have an abortion if she had fit into one of the three exceptions stipulated by law: that her life was in danger from the pregnancy, that her physical health was at risk or that the fetus could not survive.
Since Thurman was a healthy pregnant woman, she did not find a clinic in Georgia where she could terminate her pregnancy.
An unusual complication
When she reached the ninth week of gestation, Thurman decided to travel to the neighboring state of North Carolina, where abortion was allowed up to week 12.
Although she left early in the morning and drove for hours to the clinic, she got stuck in traffic and missed her appointment. There were so many patients from other nearby states in the same situation that they couldn’t assign her another appointment throughout the day.
However, The doctors prescribed mifepristone and misoprostol.the most used pills in the United States to induce abortion before the tenth week of pregnancy.
Thurman followed medical instructions, but had an unusual complication. His body did not completely expel the fetal tissue and he had an infection.
As his fever worsened, he went to a hospital in the town of Stockbridge, 34 kilometers south of the state capital, Atlanta.
Doctors concluded that Thurman required a procedure called dilation and curettage, which involves scraping and collecting tissue inside the uterus.
Although the health center had all the resources to perform the intervention, the doctors were not sure if they could be accused of violating state laws for applying it in this case.
As they argued and waited, Thurman lost blood pressure and his organs collapsed. 20 hours after arriving at the hospital, the doctors finally decided to operate on her, but she died during the surgery..
Thurman’s case came to light two years after his death. just a month ago, after a committee of maternal mortality experts evaluated the hospital records.
Although the committee’s evaluation is confidential, its findings were revealed by the American media ProPublicaalong with interviews with Thurman’s family and friends who recounted the details of her attempts to obtain an abortion during the nine weeks of that pregnancy.
“There is a good chance that an earlier D&C would have prevented Amber Thurman’s death.”the committee concluded as reported ProPublicawhich defined this case and that of another woman in Georgia as the first deaths due to lack of access to abortion services that could have been prevented.
“Let’s say his name”
On September 20, four days after the publication of ProPublica, Kamala Harris He made an unexpected stop in Atlanta, in the middle of his campaign for the presidency, which he is fighting against the Republican candidate, donald trump.
“Let’s say her name: Amber Nicole Thurman”Harris said before an audience of Democratic supporters, made up mostly of African-American women like Thurman.
“She had planned her future. It was her plan, she had a plan,” Harris said as she began telling her story. “Under Trump’s abortion ban, his doctors could have faced up to a decade in prison for offering Amber the assistance she needed.”
Days later, the vice president released a campaign video showing three women who are related to Thurman visiting her grave. “What happened to her was avoidable. My daughter died because of what Donald Trump did”says his mother looking at the camera.
Then an interview appears in which Trump claims to feel “proud” for having achieved the repeal of Roe v. Wadethe Supreme Court ruling that protected the right to abortion for almost 50 years in the United States.
Trump’s position
In an attempt to reach out to more moderate voters, and despite the rejection of the most radical anti-abortion leaders and groups, Trump maintains that he would veto the federal ban on abortion if he became president.
“Everyone knows that I would not support a federal abortion ban.under no circumstances, and, in fact, I would veto it, because it is up to the states to decide based on the will of their voters (the will of the people!),” he stated in a tweet he published on X on October 1.
Although abortion is an issue that has polarized the electoral debate, like other issues such as migration or the possession of firearms, opinion studies indicate that the majority supports the right to terminate pregnancy.
A survey published in May by the Pew Research Center indicates that 63% of those interviewed believe that abortion should be legal in all or most cases, while 36% think it should be illegal.
In the case of pills, 53% think that pregnancy termination medications should be available in their states.
A survey by public health consultancy KFF revealed this month that for women under 30, access to abortion is a more important issue than inflation or the economy, the priorities for the rest of the electorate.
In addition to the election of the president, On November 5, the inhabitants of 10 states of the country will vote in local consultations for or against protecting the right to abortion in their respective jurisdictions.
Emergency treatment
Of the 331.4 million inhabitants of the United States, 65.5 million are women between 15 and 49 years old, that is, they are of reproductive age.
Democratic congressmen and abortion rights organizations claim that Georgia’s laws, like those of other states that prohibit the procedure, violate the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (Emtala)which requires hospitals to offer the assistance required by a patient who arrives in an emergency.
Researchers at Ohio State University have warned that the infant mortality rate increased nationwide, especially among babies with birth defects, during the first two years that state abortion restrictions have been in place.
Despite cases like Thurman’s, the maternal mortality rate decreased in the years after the repeal of Roe v. Wadeaccording to preliminary estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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