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The 28 year old mother from Georgia died when she couldn’t access safe abortion care. But her story has been weaponised ahead of November’s Presidential election.
Amber Thurman never set out to become a political symbol, but death has a way of making martyrs out of human tragedies.
The 28-year-old mother from rural Georgia died in late August 2022 of sepsis complications, a condition that could have been prevented had she been granted access to safe abortion care.
Thurman had a young son and dreamed of becoming a nurse when she passed away, just two weeks after her state’s abortion ban went into effect.
Georgia’s six-week abortion ban, known as the ‘heartbeat law’, has been the subject of contentious debate since it was passed in 2019. But the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade gave the law real teeth.
The legislation forbids abortion once cardiac activity is detected – usually around six weeks – before many women even realise they’re pregnant.
Expectations do, theoretically, exist for cases like Thurmans: medical emergencies and the life of the mother. Theory doesn’t always prevail in reality, however.
Thurman discovered she was pregnant with twins in the summer of 2022, after just finding her feet as a mother to her young son. The pregnancy had already progressed beyond the six week mark, so Thurman drove to North Carolina with her best friend, where a clinic gave her abortion pills.
This medication has very low rates of complications, but rare problems do occur, and in Thurman’s case the pills were unsuccessful in expelling all pregnancy tissue from her uterus.
She later arrived in a Georgia hospital with bleeding, pain, and falling blood pressure – all signs of an infection.
In this case, Thurman could have been saved by a surgical abortion – also known as a D&C, or dilation and curettage. The procedure is minimally invasive and commonplace.
But Georgia’s stringent anti-abortion laws had banned the D&C procedure, making it a felony to perform except in cases of a ‘naturally occurring’ miscarriage.
Thurman suffered in hospital for 20 hours, developing sepsis and eventually experiencing organ failure.
The Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision that overruled Roe v. Wade has thrown the question of reproductive rights back to the states, creating a patchwork of laws where a woman’s access to care depends on her zip code.
Amber Thurman was a casualty of this system. Her death has now reignited the reproductive freedom debate just as the November Presidential election approaches, with both sides weaponising her story to suit their own political narrative.
Republican politicians are toeing a careful line, unwilling to concede that the law itself might have contributed to Thurman’s death.
Long-time Trump supporters like Marjorie Taylor Greene have spearheaded the argument that Thurman tragically died from taking abortion pills, not from being denied an abortion under Georgia’s abortion laws.
Kamala Harris, however, has used Thurman’s tragic death as a tool in her presidential campaign, blaming Donald Trump for threatening women’s freedoms and their lives.
Whether or not Amber Thurman’s health complications were initially triggered by taking abortion pills, the fact remains that a 28-year-old was denied vital care when she was clearly at risk of death, and this failing was solely due to the stringent anti-abortion laws sweeping the US.
