In her debate with creepy Donald Trump, one of the most compelling moments was when Kamala Harris described how, thanks to the abortion bans enabled by the overturning of Roe v. Wade by the Supreme Court, a woman suffering a miscarriage was bleeding in her car in a hospital parking lot because doctors were afraid that they would violate the state’s abortion ban if they treated her. Harris said that this one of the consequences of what she called ‘Trump’s abortion bans’.
But that woman was by no means an isolated case. There are plenty of other horror stories and ProPublica tells the story of Amber Thurman who died because doctors were scared to treat her.
In her final hours, Amber Nicole 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.
Thurman waited in pain in a hospital bed, worried about what would happen to her 6-year-old son, as doctors monitored her infection spreading, her blood pressure sinking and her organs beginning to fail.
It took 20 hours for doctors to finally operate. By then, it was too late.
The otherwise healthy 28-year-old medical assistant, who had her sights set on nursing school, should not have died, an official state committee recently concluded.
…The most restrictive state laws, experts predicted, would pit doctors’ fears of prosecution against their patients’ health needs, requiring providers to make sure their patient was inarguably on the brink of death or facing “irreversible” harm when they intervened with procedures like a D&C.
“They would feel the need to wait for a higher blood pressure, wait for a higher fever — really got to justify this one — bleed a little bit more,” Dr. Melissa Kottke, an OB-GYN at Emory, warned lawmakers in 2019 during one of the hearings over Georgia’s ban.
That this should have happened is infuriating.
But that is not all. ProPublican then described what happened to Candi Miller, again in Georgia, because she could not get a D&C procedurte when she needed it.
When a state committee of experts in maternal health, including 10 doctors, reviewed her case this year at the end of August, they immediately decided it was “preventable” and blamed the state’s abortion ban, according to members who spoke to ProPublica on the condition of anonymity.
They came to that conclusion after weighing the entire chain of events, from Miller’s underlying health conditions, to her decision to manage her abortion alone, to her reticence to seek medical care. “The fact that she felt that she had to make these decisions, that she didn’t have adequate choices here in Georgia, we felt that definitely influenced her case,” one committee member told ProPublica. “She’s absolutely responding to this legislation.”
…
Her case adds to mounting evidence that exceptions to abortion bans do not, as billed, protect the “life of the mother.” Harrowing stories about denied care have been at the center of the upcoming presidential election, during which the right to abortion is on the ballot in 10 states. ProPublica’s new reporting makes clear, for the first time, that in the wake of bans, women are losing their lives in ways that experts have deemed preventable.
And these are just cases in Georgia.Thee are equally extreme restrictions in many other states.
It is utterly obscene that preventable deaths like these are happening because doctors are fearful of giving women the treatment they need. How many such deaths will it take before these Trump abortion bans are seen by everyone for what they are, a horrendous infringement on women’s health and bodies?
Creepy Trump is trying to duck and weave on this issue, saying that all he did was send the abortion issue back to the states and that he is not responsible for what the states do. But that is utterly disingenuous. Many states already had abortion bans in readiness and it was obvious that they were just waiting for the removal for Roe to charge ahead. He knew this and did not care.
It will be utterly fitting if this issue, so cruel, is the one that sends him and the GOP into political oblivion and the label that Harris has put of ‘Trump abortion bans’ should be made to stick.
This alone should make any empathic person drop Trump.
Brit here, with very little idea of US political commentators, but I had something else playing in the background on Youtube yesterday and when it finished, this opinion piece from Lawrence O’Donnell started autoplaying. I don’t know if there’s some reason I don’t recall seeing him mentioned on FTB -- for all I know, this might be the only sensible thing he’s ever said -- but it was a really powerful response to Amber Thurman’s death, and I would recommend watching it -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMaHAI5tGUI
By the way, to add a totally off topic link, there’s been an ongoing investigation into the Titan submersible, and this Bluesky thread looking at the results so far makes for really interesting reading -- https://bsky.app/profile/tubetime.bsky.social/post/3l4hquitedk2j
Trump, along with Kavanaugh, Barrett, Gorsuch, Alito, Roberts, and Thomas, has blood on his hands. This is stochastic murder.
“So long as women are controlled, who cares?” -- the far right, probably.
Human rights should not be determined on a state by state basis.
Bekenstein Bound @ 3
“This is stochastic murder.”
Republicans: “So?”
The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind.
Seriously though , its shocking the lack of remorse the Republicans show. I wish the media would just label them for what they are the pro-death and pro-suffering for everyone party.
Retrumplitarian cowardice about this issue is best encapsulated in their refusal to believe that that 10-year-old girl who had to travel to another state to get an abortion after being raped was even real. They’re not serious about actually governing, they can’t handle reality, and they’re totally unfit to even babysit a cat, let alone run a state or country.
It must be pointed out, as well, that these two women in Georgia who died being refused medical care, were *already miscarrying*, whether abortion-pill induced or not. The fetus was already going to die, nothing could stop that.
So, we see the true purpose of this fiat again: not to “save babies”, but to punish and control women.
Abortions are life- saving and would be necessary even if there were no unplanned fertilizations. Sometimes pregnancy goes wrong and the only thing you can do is save the Mother from dying of sepsis or blood loss.
That poor woman who was denied a routine D&C and died of sepsis even though she wasn’t even pregnant!
Those doctors and that hospital should be charged with homicide, as should every legislator who created and passed misogynistic legislation to kill women with their own reproductive systems.