Amber Thurman Died From The Abortion Pill, Not Pro-Life Laws

Democrats and their corporate media allies are so desperate to get rid of pro-life laws that they’ll fabricate stories to wrongly smear them as not only bad for women but deadly.

The latest is ProPublica’s story of a Georgia woman who died after a North Carolina abortionist gave her chemical abortion pills — which, contrary to Democrat narratives, are unsafe. The article, however, pretends the death was caused by Georgia’s pro-life laws. The author of the story repeatedly attempts to conflate a procedure used to treat miscarriages, dilation and curettage (D&C), with elective abortion.

In ProPublica’s telling, 28-year-old Amber Nicole Thurman had ingested the chemical abortion pill regimen, which consists of the drugs mifepristone and misoprostol. Mifepristone ends the life of the developing human being; misoprostol helps achieve complete expulsion of the embryo.

It’s worth noting that the FDA’s 2000 approval of mifepristone acknowledged its risks and enacted safety requirements, including a seven-week gestational limit, requiring women to see a physician in person, and a mandatory one-time post-abortion appointment to confirm that the uterus was empty and that bleeding had subsided. The FDA also required manufacturers of the abortion pill to report all adverse health events that were reported to them, such as infection or excessive bleeding — not just patient deaths. 

But thanks to Democrat efforts to relax safety requirements for abortion pills, important safeguards no longer apply. When Thurman experienced “complications” from the abortion, which ProPublica wrongly asserts are “rare,” she went to the hospital for a D&C.

While ProPublica claims, “Thurman had told doctors her miscarriage was not spontaneous — it was the result of taking pills to terminate her pregnancy,” Thurman was not experiencing a miscarriage. She had undergone an abortion. Her unborn twins had already died, and she had retained parts of their bodies or the placenta — a known complication of abortion pill use and one of the very reasons for the FDA’s requirement for a post-abortion follow-up visit with a doctor. 

Misrepresenting Georgia Law

Here Kavitha Surana, the story’s author, fails to note the difference between elective abortion and non-abortive D&Cs. She writes: “But just that summer, [Thurman’s state of Georgia] had made performing [D&Cs] a felony, with few exceptions. Any doctor who violated the new Georgia law could be prosecuted and face up to a decade in prison.”

This is a gross mischaracterization of the Georgia law. Performing a D&C is not a felony in Georgia (or anywhere else in the nation), nor has it been criminalized. It remains a standard medical procedure — and an indispensable one in cases like Thurman’s. It is always legal in every state because, unlike abortion, it is not intentional feticide. 

“Instead of performing the newly criminalized procedure, they continued to gather information and dispense medicine,” Surana writes. But as the American Academy of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists (AAPLOG) explains in an extensive thread on X, a “D&C should have been immediate and concurrent with the initiation of antibiotics (and was not prevented by Georgia’s law).”

What the law prohibits is an overt act that directly and intentionally causes the death of the developing baby. It states:

“Abortion” means the act of using, prescribing, or administering any instrument, substance, device, or other means with the purpose to terminate a pregnancy with knowledge that termination will, with reasonable likelihood, cause the death of an unborn child.

In Thurman’s tragic case, her unborn twins were already dead by the time she arrived at the hospital. It is obvious that the performance of a D&C in this case would not constitute an abortion as there was no longer a living baby to abort. No physician performing any procedure to save Thurman’s life could or would be prosecuted.

In fact, the author misquotes the statute, stating:

It prohibits doctors from using any instrument “with the purpose of terminating a pregnancy.” While removing fetal tissue is not terminating a pregnancy, medically speaking, the law only specifies it’s not considered an abortion to remove “a dead unborn child” that resulted from a “spontaneous abortion” defined as “naturally occurring” from a miscarriage or a stillbirth”.

The author does not quote the law in full, leaving the impression that it is a felony to perform a D&C to remove a dead fetus from a mother’s uterus. This is not true, nor is other information ProPublica includes about D&Cs or abortion.

For instance, Surana writes, “The availability of D&Cs for both abortions and routine miscarriage care helped save lives after the 1973 Supreme Court ruling in Roe v. Wade, studies show, reducing the rate of maternal deaths for women of color by up to 40% the first year after abortion became legal.” But D&Cs have been an integral part of medical practice for nearly two centuries in the United States, with the curette being first “invented and used … in about 1845.” Abortion has also been available in the United States since at least the 17th century, evidenced by laws from that time prohibiting elective abortions. It didn’t start with Roe.

And note Surana’s racial detour, which is conjecture at best. She characterizes Georgia as a state with “one of the nation’s highest rates of maternal mortality” and says, “Black women are three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related complications than white women.” The implication is that abortion reduces maternal deaths in women of color, but no study based on patient-level data has ever shown that abortion reduces maternal mortality.

Misrepresenting the Truth About Doctors

ProPublica’s argument rests on the assumption that pro-life laws make doctors afraid to give life-saving care to women. Surana writes:

When [obstetrical doctors] do try to provide care, it can be a challenge to find other medical staff to participate. A D&C requires an anesthesiologist, nurses, attending physicians and others. Doctors said peers have refused to participate because of their personal views or their fear of being exposed to criminal charges. Georgia law allows medical staff to refuse to participate in abortions.

This statement flies in the face of the lived experience of doctors who regularly care for women like Thurman. A D&C for retained fetal parts or placenta is a commonly performed gynecologic procedure, not a crime or “a challenge” — either before or after Dobbs v. Jackson. Catholic hospitals, whose staff do not perform abortions, treat women with this condition every day. As of 2011, only 14 percent of OB-GYNs in the United States performed elective abortions — largely because of religious beliefs, but ProPublica fails to mention this fact.

ProPublica’s attempt to blur the distinction between D&C for retained tissue, whether in the aftermath of an elective abortion or a miscarriage, and D&C to end the life of the developing baby underscores the media’s smear campaign against pro-life laws — a campaign that harms women and attempts to misshape public opinion. 

Misrepresenting the Dangers of Abortion Pills

Minimizing the risks of mifepristone can lead women to ignore abortion doubts and adverse reactions. Yet ProPublica paints Thurman’s abortion pill complications as “rare.”

However, retained baby body parts and other abortion pill complications are not rare. One study comparing outcomes between medical and surgical abortion showed that with abortion pills, the risk of hemorrhage was 15.6 percent, the risk of incomplete induced abortion (retained fetal parts or placenta) was 6.7 percent, and the risk of emergency surgery was 5.9 percent. Given that at least half of the approximately 834,637 abortions that occur in the United States every year are with pills, approximately 27,960 will have an incomplete induced abortion. How many of them will endure the complications of abortion, as Thurman did, until they’re so severe they lead to death?

ProPublica states, “Out of nearly 6 million women who’ve taken mifepristone in the U.S. since 2000, 32 deaths were reported to the FDA through 2022, regardless of whether the drug played a role. Of those, 11 patients developed sepsis.” However, FDA reports do not capture information about all possible deaths related to mifepristone. Only drug manufacturers are mandated to report adverse events associated with their product, and only deaths and complications that were reported to manufacturers must be reported to the government.

Deaths and complications not reported are not included in the FDA’s reports, and it is almost certain that many deaths and complications have not been reported for a variety of reasons. From Sept. 28, 2000, through Dec. 31, 2022, the FDA received reports of 4,218 adverse events, 1,049 hospitalizations, 604 patients who required transfusion, and 418 infections, 75 severe. This is probably the tip of the iceberg. 

Amber Thurman did not die because of Georgia’s abortion law, which was enacted to protect the lives of mothers and preborn children. She died from complications of medical abortion. Perhaps, had the FDA decided not to remove its mandatory requirement for a doctor’s follow-up visit from abortion pill labeling, and had she received more appropriate care, she might have survived.

ProPublica says, “Thurman’s case marks the first time an abortion-related death, officially deemed ‘preventable,’ is coming to public light.” But what about the death of Alexandra Nunez? Or Rebecca Charland, Tonya Reaves, Jennifer Morbelli, Maria Santiago, Lakisha Wilson, Jamie Lee Morales, Cree Erwin Sheppard, Keisha Atkins, Tia Archeiva Parks, or April Lowery — all of whom died during or shortly after their abortions?

Were their deaths preventable? Or is maternal death associated with elective abortion acceptable, even though such abortions are performed on healthy mothers with healthy babies?

Monique Chireau Wobbenhorst is a board-certified Obstetrician-Gynecologist with more than three decades of experience in care for pregnant women. She holds a master’s degree in Public Health (MPH) from Harvard University. Mary Hallan FioRito is an attorney and the Francis Cardinal George Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, where her areas of expertise include abortion law and policy.