Georgia judge lifts six-week abortion ban after the deaths of two women who couldn’t access care

In Georgia, women can again legally have an abortion after six weeks of pregnancy, following a judge’s decision strongly worded command this week tossing the state ban. While Governor Brian Kemp and Georgia Attorney General were quick to speak out against the decision appealedproviders told ProPublica that they immediately resumed such care.

Planned Parenthood’s four Georgia clinics are getting a lot of calls from within the state and from surrounding areas, where most abortions remain illegal, said Jaylen Black, the organization’s vice president of marketing and communications for the Southeast region. The workers also call patients they had to turn away before. “We managed to reschedule them,” Black said.

The new, albeit temporary, access is the latest wave of developments in the past two weeks since ProPublica broke the stories of Amber Nicole Thurman and Candi Miller, Georgia women who died after being denied access to legal abortions and timely medical care. state. The 10-physician panel of maternal health experts deemed their deaths “preventable,” shifting the debate about such outcomes from the hypothetical to a new American reality.

“This is not something the state can easily sweep under the rug,” said Monica Simpson, executive director of SisterSong, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit challenging the ban. “This is now a national issue.”

The women’s stories resonated with the US Senatethe vice presidential debate and demonstration in front of the Georgia Capitol. Vice President Kamala Harris spoke with one of their families Oprah Winfreythen traveled to Atlanta to give a speech about them. “We now know that at least two women — and these are just the stories we know — have died in the state of Georgia — because of Trump’s abortion ban” he told the crowd. Before launching into her first set, she led the crowd in a chant to “say her name: Amber Nicole Thurman, Amber Nicole Thurman, Amber Nicole Thurman.”

Thurman died on August 19, 2022, a month after Georgia’s abortion ban went into effect, before many women knew they were pregnant. Thurman traveled to North Carolina, where she received abortion medication and did not fully expel the fetal tissue.

Because of the rare complication, he sought treatment at a hospital in suburban Atlanta, where he was diagnosed with sepsis, a life-threatening infection. As her condition worsened, doctors discussed a procedure to empty the uterus called a dilation and curettage, or D&C; the state has recently, with a few exceptions, imposed criminal penalties for its enforcement. According to records reviewed by ProPublica, it took 20 hours after Thurman’s arrival for doctors to do so. He came too late.

Miller, who died on November 12, 2022, had lupus, diabetes and high blood pressure, and doctors warned that another pregnancy could kill her. She ordered abortion pills online, but she didn’t expel all the fetal tissue and needed a D&C. Her family later told a coroner that she had not seen a doctor “because of the current legislation on pregnancy and abortion”. Her children watched her suffer in bed for days, moaning in pain. He ended up taking a lethal combination of painkillers.

Georgia’s Maternal Death Review Commission, which is tasked with studying deaths of pregnant women and new mothers to recommend improvements in care, directly blamed the state’s abortion ban for Miller’s death, according to members who spoke to ProPublica on condition of anonymity. The commission found that the hospital’s delay in performing the critical procedure on Thurman had a “major” impact on her “preventable” outcome. The hospital and the doctors involved in his care did not explain the delay or comment on the incident; An attorney retained by Thurman’s family said the hospital had the right to perform the procedure.

While defenders of the ban said it included an exception to save the mother’s life, doctors told ProPublica that the language doesn’t take into account the rapidly changing realities of emergency medicine or the complexities of maternal health.

Although Miller’s underlying conditions would have made the pregnancy more risky as the pregnancy progressed, that alone did not make her eligible for an abortion. And after both she and Thurman needed D&Cs to clean up fetal tissue, neither of their cases seemed to clearly fit the language of the exception to the ban that allowed doctors to perform it.

It allows doctors to remove a ‘spontaneous abortion’ called a ‘spontaneous abortion’, which is caused by a miscarriage or stillbirth. Thurman told doctors that her miscarriage was not spontaneous, but the result of abortion pills. Most bans, including Georgia’s, allow abortions that are “necessary to prevent the death of the pregnant woman or substantial and irreversible bodily impairment of a major bodily function.” There’s no standard protocol for how providers should interpret such language, doctors told ProPublica — or how far a patient must go to qualify.

Forty-one senators presented a resolution It was inspired by a ProPublica report calling on hospitals in every state to provide emergency abortion care when their patients need it. Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat who chairs the powerful Senate Finance Committee, the pending request for information from the hospital treating Thurman to determine whether the doctors violated federal emergency care law. (The hospital did not respond to ProPublica’s requests for comment on questions about compliance with the law.)

And on Monday in Georgia, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert CI McBurney struck down a key part of the state’s ban, which criminalizes nearly all abortions after about six weeks.

“It is not for the legislature, the judge or the commander of ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ to tell these women what to do with their bodies during this time when the fetus cannot survive outside the womb,” McBurney said in his ruling.

“The Court finds that until the pregnancy is viable, a woman’s right to make decisions about her body and health remains private and protected, that is, her business and hers alone. When someone other than the pregnant woman is able to sustain the fetus, then—and only then—can other voices be heard in the debate about what decisions the pregnant woman makes about her body and the things that grow inside it.”

By revoking the six-week ban, McBurney reverted to the state’s previous standard, which allowed abortions until the fetus was deemed viable, at about 22 weeks of pregnancy.

Kemp, a Republican who said he was “thrilled” when the ban first went into effect, said this week through a spokesman: “Once again, the personal convictions of a judge overrode the will of Georgians and their representatives.”

The ruling is the second time McBurney has blocked a state abortion ban.

in 2022 issued a decision that the law was unconstitutional when the state legislature passed it in 2019, until the US Supreme Court struck down the federal constitutional right to abortion three years later. The State appealed and Its Supreme Court reinstated the ban until he can review McBurney’s sentence.

About a year later, with the ban still in effect, the state Supreme Court rejected the argument and sent the case back to McBurney to consider the underlying issue of the lawsuit: whether the Georgia Constitution protects the right to privacy, and if yes, if you have this right. includes abortion. McBurney’s decision on Monday says emphatically that it does.

While McBurney has allowed abortions to resume in Georgia, the Supreme Court may again put the judge’s decision on hold until it takes up the case.

The last time Georgia had an abortion access window was eight days.

The urgency and immanence of this moment in Georgia was palpable in conversations with service providers. “I think this kind of moment definitely feels like a need to get a lot of care to as many people as possible,” said Kristen Baker, public affairs manager and lobbyist for Feminist Women’s Health Center, a clinic in Georgia.

Black said Planned Parenthood staff are doing everything they can “for now” to meet demand and “get people through our doors as soon as possible.”