WASHINGTON (AP) — Vice President Kamala Harris said Tuesday that the death of a young Georgia mother, who died after waiting 20 hours for a hospital to treat complications from an abortion pill, shows the consequences of Donald Trump’s actions.
Amber Thurman’s death, first reported by ProPublica on Monday, came just two weeks after Georgia’s strict abortion ban went into effect in 2022 following the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to strike down abortion rights nationwide. Trump appointed three of the justices who made that decision and has repeatedly said he believes states should set abortion laws.
“This young mother should be alive, raising her son, and pursuing her dream of going to nursing school,” Harris said in a statement. “Women are bleeding to death in parking lots, being turned away from emergency rooms, losing their ability to ever have children again. Survivors of rape and incest are being told they can’t make decisions about what happens to their bodies. And now women are dying. These are the consequences of Donald Trump’s actions.”
Harris is likely to continue to emphasize Thurman’s case as Democrats try to use the issue of abortion access to motivate female voters.
The federal government has found dozens of pregnant women have been illegally turned away from emergency rooms, and the number of cases has risen in states that ban abortion, such as Texas and Missouri, after the Supreme Court ruling. An Associated Press report found that women have suffered miscarriages in public restrooms, been forced to wait in their cars for treatment or been told by doctors to seek care elsewhere. Women have developed infections or lost parts of their reproductive tracts after hospitals in states that ban abortions postponed emergency abortions.
Thurman’s death is the first publicly reported case of a woman dying as a result of delayed care.
Trump’s campaign said Tuesday that the hospital bears some blame for failing to provide life-saving treatment.
“President Trump has always supported the exceptions for rape, incest, and the life of the mother that Georgia law provides,” Trump press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in an emailed statement. “Now that these exceptions are in place, it is unclear why doctors did not act quickly to protect Amber Thurman’s life.”
Thurman’s case is currently being reviewed by the state’s maternal mortality commission. The suburban Atlanta hospital that allegedly delayed her treatment has not been fined by the federal government for failing to provide stabilizing treatment to a pregnant patient in the past two years, an AP review of federal documents found.
Thurman sought hospital care for complications from taking an abortion pill two weeks after Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp signed a law that largely banned abortions and criminalized performing them. Even as Thurman developed sepsis, ProPublica reported that doctors at the hospital did not remove the remaining fetal tissue in her uterus in a procedure called dilation and curettage, or D&C. She died on the operating table shortly after asking her mother to care for her 6-year-old son. ProPublica said it will publish another report of an abortion-related death in the coming days.
Democrats and abortion rights advocates seized on the report, saying it showed that women’s health is suffering under draconian abortion bans. Pro-choice advocates dismissed the point as misinformation.
“We actually have substantiated evidence of something we already knew: that abortion bans can kill people,” Mini Timmaraju, president of Reproductive Freedom for All, said Monday.
___ Associated Press writer Geoff Mulvihill in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, contributed.
