Amber Nichole Thurman suffered from a grave infection that her suburban Atlanta hospital was well-equipped to treat.
She’d taken abortion pills and encountered a rare complication; 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.
But just that summer, her state had made performing the procedure a felony, with few exceptions. Any doctor who violated the new Georgia law could be prosecuted and face up to a decade in prison.
In August 2022, Amber Nicole Thurman, 28, drove to a North Carolina clinic to have an abortion, Mother Jones reported. She could not get one in her home state of Georgia because she was six weeks pregnant — and Georgia had enacted a ban forbidding abortion after six weeks’ gestation following the 2022 overturn of Roe v. Wade.
The clinic gave her the pregnancy-ending pills mifepristone and misoprostol, which she took back at home. A few days, later, Thurman had a rare complication where she didn’t expel all the fetal tissue, according to ProPublica, which was the first to report on the case.
When tissue remains in the uterus, it can cause “infection, which can damage your reproductive organs or even cause dangerous complications like sepsis when left untreated,” the Cleveland Clinic says.
VP says woman’s death after delayed abortion treatment shows consequences of Trump’s actions
“This young mother should be alive, raising her son, and pursuing her dream of attending nursing school,” Harris said in a statement. “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 brought up Thurman’s “tragic” case just hours later again during a sit-down interview with a trio of journalists from the National Association of Black Journalists. She is likely to continue raising Thurman’s death through Election Day as Democrats try to use the issue of abortion access to motivate women voters. Harris said she wants to restore Roe v. Wade protections if elected president, an unlikely feat that would require a federal law passed with bipartisan support from Congress.
