If the Christian right had not had its way at the Supreme Court, Amber Nicole Thurman would be alive today. She would have been able to get the medical care she needed in 2022. She would have lived to pursue her career ambitions and see her little boy grow up. Instead, the 28-year-old died a completely avoidable death in a Georgia hospital because the doctors treating her were terrified of committing a felony under the state’s abortion ban.
The true crime is that Thurman’s life was cut short because of ideologues who for 50 years trumpeted “biblical” values as they sought to make women pay for unwanted pregnancies, even with their lives.
The LIFE Act is what happens when single-minded religious zealots seize political power.
A new report in ProPublica reveals the details of Thurman’s excruciating final days and death, which a state medical committee recently deemed “preventable.” Thurman learned she was pregnant with twins in the summer of 2022. Mother to a young son, she was hoping to attend nursing school and “quickly decided she needed to preserve her newfound stability,” her best friend, Ricaria Baker, told ProPublica.
But three years earlier, Georgia’s Republican-controlled state Legislature passed a law prohibiting abortion at six weeks. After the Supreme Court’s overturned Roe v. Wade’s constitutional right to abortion in June 2022, the ban went into effect. Georgia became one of the first places to close the door on virtually all abortions, and many other GOP-run states soon followed. The law — with the dystopian title of Living Infants and Fairness Equality Act, or “LIFE Act” — does has a vague exception to protect the life of the mother. But most exceptions in these laws, reports the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization supporting reproductive rights, “are designed to be unworkable, containing vague and contradictory language and imposing cumbersome requirements.”
When Georgia’s ban went into effect, Thurman’s pregnancy had just passed six weeks. According to ProPublica, Thurman scheduled a dilation and curettage in North Carolina, which still permitted abortion. But when traffic delayed her travel, the clinic — “inundated with women from other states where bans had taken effect” — could not keep her appointment slot. A clinic employee gave her legally obtained abortion pills to use instead. (“Her pregnancy was well within the standard of care for that treatment,” ProPublica reports.)
Unfortunately, upon her return home, Thurman suffered a highly unusual complication, with increasing pain and heavy bleeding. The North Carolina clinic would have performed a D&C as a free follow-up, but it was too far away. Instead, Thurman went to a nearby hospital. Citing medical records, ProPublica says that “doctors noted a foul odor during a pelvic exam, and an ultrasound showed possible tissue in her uterus.”
Usually, these signs of sepsis would be addressed with a D&C to remove the fetal tissue. But the LIFE Act prohibits “administering any instrument … with the purpose of terminating a pregnancy.” That made performing this normally commonplace and safe procedure a possible felony for the doctors. Hospital staff delayed the procedure for nearly a day, as Thurman’s condition worsened. Finally, hours after her organs began failing, she was taken in for surgery — during which she died. Her mother recalled her last words: “Promise me you’ll take care of my son.”
Trump knows that these kinds of stories — and Thurman’s is far from the only one — are bad news for his campaign.
It was not Thurman’s legal use of abortion pills that caused her to die. Deaths stemming from the use of abortion pills are exceedingly rare. “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,” ProPublica reports. “Of those, 11 patients developed sepsis.” The cause of Amber Thurman’s death was the Republican-led criminalization of healthcare when she developed a condition that demanded immediate lifesaving attention. The LIFE Act killed Amber Thurman.
The LIFE Act is what happens when single-minded religious zealots seize political power. Anti-abortion activists, claiming to have a more pure and literal interpretation of Christianity than everyone else, and claiming to have a divine directive to make American law conform to it, insisted on this. They insisted on ending Roe v. Wade, chipping away at it for five decades until former President Donald Trump made their dream come true. He delivered on his promise of a right-wing Supreme Court majority. That majority, in turn, unleashed the sadistic laws that endanger the lives of women in dozens of states, restricting their rights to make their own decisions and get lifesaving care.
When Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp signed the bill into law, he said, “Georgia is a state that values life.” He added, “We stand up for those who are unable to speak for themselves.” But when Amber Thurman lay in a hospital bed, none of these “pro-life” heroes were there to treat her as a person with even a shred of dignity, much less any rights.
Trump knows that these kinds of stories — and Thurman’s is far from the only one — are bad news for his campaign. So now he’s gaslighting the public once again about the fallout from the Dobbs decision, his critical role in the criminalization of abortion, and his Project 2025 allies’ plans for another term. At last week’s presidential debate, he brazenly lied that all sides “wanted this issue to be brought back to the states, where the people could vote.”
But Americans didn’t ask for the “issue to be brought back to the states” so that Christian nationalist legislators could dictate the most intimate decisions of their lives. Amber Thurman didn’t ask for a lecture on life from her governor. She only wanted to live.
