An Abortion Ban Killed Amber Thurman—and Likely Many More

Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe two years ago, many of us have been holding our breaths, waiting for our dead woman.

Now we know her name.

It’s Amber Nicole Thurman.

She was 28 and worked as a medical assistant and had a 6-year-old son whom she loved to take to petting zoos and the beach. As was horribly predictable, in a country where Black women seek abortions at higher rates and die far more commonly from maternal-health complications, she was Black. She died because doctors in Georgia did not perform a routine procedure to remove tissue retained after a medication abortion. She had wanted a procedural abortion in Georgia, but was forced by the state’s six-week ban to travel four hours away to North Carolina, where she missed her appointment because of standstill traffic. The clinic offered her a medication abortion instead; at nine weeks, she was well within the standard of care for that treatment. The complication she suffered is rare and can be treated with a routine procedure. She died because her home state of Georgia had made that routine procedure a felony.

Now her son is starting a new school year without her.

ProPublica reported Thurman’s death Monday. It’s the first confirmed case after Dobbs where an abortion ban killed a woman. What’s most striking to me, beyond the sheer tragedy of her death, is how much work it took to confirm it. Reporter Kavitha Surana combed through death records and coroners’ reports to find cases that seemed related to abortion access. She first reached out to Thurman’s loved ones a year ago. Eventually, she obtained a document where the state’s maternal mortality review committee spelled out in black and white that Thurman’s death was “preventable.” On Wednesday ProPublica reported on a second death from Georgia’s abortion ban—that of Candi Miller, who had been warned her health was so fragile that another pregnancy could kill her. In 2022, when she became pregnant, Miller ordered abortion medication online. She experienced the same rare complication as Thurman, but she was afraid to seek care because of the state’s abortion ban. Instead, she took painkillers and suffered at home, until her husband found her unresponsive in bed with her 3-year-old daughter by her side. Given what it took to confirm that these deaths resulted from a ban, as Surana writes, “There are almost certainly others.” How many deaths have we not heard about, because finding them requires such intensive reporting?

In January, The New Yorker’s Stephania Taladrid reported on a young woman from Texas who had died two weeks after Roe was overturned from pregnancy-related complications, asking, as the headline read: “Did an Abortion Ban Cost a Young Texas Woman Her Life?” It was hard to say for sure, although it seemed the answer was yes. Yeni Glick, an aspiring scientist and certified nursing aide, suffered from health conditions, including hypertension, diabetes, and a history of pulmonary edema, that made pregnancy riskier for her. Undoubtedly, these conditions were complicated by the fact that she couldn’t afford the needed medications and prenatal care, but, as Taladrid reported, when Glick’s health collapsed during an acute hypertensive episode, her providers never gave her the option of an abortion, and she died awaiting transfer to a larger hospital. Glick’s death involved larger, structural failures like poverty and lack of healthcare access, and doubtless, many of the post-Dobbs deaths we’ve all been expecting are like hers—not the result of any one policy. They are no less tragic because of that.

It is hard to isolate the death of a young woman of color from these compounding causes in a country with the highest maternal mortality rate in the developed world. It is rare that an official document turns up that declares a death “preventable.”

But in Amber Thurman’s case, it happened. Hers is a rare case of a death we can lay squarely at the feet of a particular law. The question now is whether her death will lead to change. Will she become a rallying cry, like Savita Halappanavar, whose death after she was denied an abortion while miscarrying helped bring about the repeal of Ireland’s nationwide abortion ban? Or, like dead women from eras of lost abortion rights past, will she haunt us like a ghost, reminding our country of its failures?

I’ve been digging into the deaths of women from abortion bans for a book on the history of the anti-abortion movement, and what I’ve found so far is that anti-abortion policies tend to endure even after they’ve been traced to a woman’s death.