Media Claims A Georgia Woman Died Due To Laws Banning Abortion. Here’s The Truth.

Over the past few days, media outlets, including The New York Times, Newsweek, and MSNBC, have all cited a claim that a woman died because of strict pro-life laws.

Amber Thurman, these outlets reported, citing an article from ProPublica, would have survived if not for Georgia’s laws on abortion. The truth, however, has nothing to do with Georgia’s abortion laws and everything to do with taking dangerous abortion pills without any follow-up care.

Thurman made the tragic decision to end the lives of her unborn twins by legally obtaining abortion pills in North Carolina. She took the pills and returned home to Georgia, where, five days after taking the pills, she faced a serious complication. ProPublica doesn’t say whether she received any follow-up care from the place that provided her the pills in North Carolina or whether they ever called to check up on her after handing her the pills.

Though abortion groups claim that abortion pills are safe and effective, pro-life medical professionals and legal scholars point to instances of serious medical complications, such as the one Thurman faced. Some of the remains from her aborted babies remained in her uterus and were causing her to develop an infection.

When she went to a hospital in her home state of Georgia, it took doctors several days to perform a D&C, or dilation and curettage, the medical procedure to remove the remains from her uterus. There is no evidence at all that Georgia’s abortion laws played any role in the delay of this care, as ProPublica admits in paragraph 57.

“It is not clear from the records available why doctors waited to provide a D&C,” the outlet reported near the end of its story. The outlet blamed Georgia’s abortion law that prevents an abortion after a fetal heartbeat is detected. In Thurman’s case, there was no fetal heartbeat since the twins were already dead, thus the law wouldn’t have delayed care.

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Georgia’s law defines “abortion” as an act that “will, with reasonable likelihood, cause the death of an unborn child.”

Again, Thurman’s twins were already dead, so there is nothing in the law that would prevent Georgia from providing a D&C. Instead, ProPublica spoke to unrelated OB-GYNs to speculate about alleged ambiguities in the law that could have made it responsible for Thurman’s death.

Thurman was treated when she went to the hospital in Georgia, as Life News reported. She was put on antibiotics and an IV drip, and the OB-GYN suggested a D&C for the next day, but the procedure wasn’t performed at that time. The next day, the doctors continued her IV fluid, increased her antibiotics, and gave her blood pressure medication, as well as tested her for pneumonia and STDs. They also kept talking about the D&C without performing it.

By the time they finally did begin the procedure, Thurman needed a hysterectomy, and doctors found blood in her bowels, which could have been a side effect of the blood pressure medication they had put her on. Thurman died during the operation, and her death was preventable if she had obtained the D&C earlier, but there is no reason given for why this procedure was delayed – and there is no evidence it was because of Georgia’s abortion laws.

It’s not the first time since Roe v. Wade was overturned that the media falsely claimed new restrictions on abortion hampered emergency care, as The Daily Wire’s Mairead Elordi previously reported.

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