(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . ProPublica details first-reported preventable deaths in GA due to abortion ban after fall of Roe [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2024-09-17 ProPublica has published a harrowing new report on how the fall or Roe and the resulting Trump abortion ban in Georgia has resulted in at least two confirmed deaths in that state due to the two women not being able to access a legal medical abortion and timely care. ProPublica learned about these two tragic cases by obtaining the reports of a maternal mortality review committee set up in Georgia to examine pregnancy-related deaths to improve maternal health — similar committees are set up in other states. Although the committee’s reports are not made public, ProPublica managed to get the reports. The Georgia committee has a two-year backlog, so it is just now looking at cases that took place after Trump’s Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. According to ProPublica, the committee’s report marks the first time that abortion-related deaths officially deemed “preventable” are coming to public light. In the report published yesterday, ProPublica tells the distressing and painful story of one of the two patients, Amber Nicole Thurman, and says it will tell the story of the other woman in the coming days. 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. Thurman was a 28-year-old medical assistant, with a six-year-old son, who had dreams of going to nursing school. The Georgia committee determined that her death was “preventable” and that the hospital’s delay in performing the critical procedure had a “large” impact on her fatal outcome. According to Thurman’s friends and family, Thurman’s life was moving in a solid, stable and positive direction when she found it she was pregnant. Thurman, who carried the full load of a single parent, loved being a mother. Every chance she got, she took her son to petting zoos, to pop-up museums and on planned trips, like one to a Florida beach. “The talks I have with my son are everything,” she posted on social media. But when she learned she was pregnant with twins in the summer of 2022, she quickly decided she needed to preserve her newfound stability, her best friend, Ricaria Baker, told ProPublica. Thurman and her son had recently moved out of her family’s home and into a gated apartment complex with a pool, and she was planning to enroll in nursing school. The timing could not have been worse. On July 20, the day Georgia’s law banning abortion at six weeks went into effect, her pregnancy had just passed that mark, according to records her family shared with ProPublica. Since Thurman was not able to get a legal abortion in Georgia, she scheduled an appointment for a D&C for August 13 at a clinic in North Carolina, where abortion at that stage was still legal. As reported by ProPublica, the availability of D&Cs for both abortions and routine miscarriage care helped save lives after the 1973 Supreme Court ruling in Roe v. Wade, studies show, reducing the rate of maternal deaths for women of color by up to 40% the first year after abortion became legal. Thurman got up at 4:00 a.m. to make the drive to North Carolina with her friend. The NC clinic was four hours away. On their drive, they hit standstill traffic, Baker said. The clinic couldn’t hold Thurman’s spot longer than 15 minutes — it was inundated with women from other states where bans had taken effect. Instead, a clinic employee offered Thurman a two-pill abortion regimen approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, mifepristone and misoprostol. Her pregnancy was well within the standard of care for that treatment. Getting to the clinic had required scheduling a day off from work, finding a babysitter, making up an excuse to borrow a relative’s car and walking through a crowd of anti-abortion protesters. Thurman didn’t want to reschedule, Baker said. At the clinic, Thurman sat through a counseling session in which she was told how to safely take the pills and instructed to go to the emergency room if complications developed. She signed a release saying she understood. She took the first pill there and insisted on driving home before any symptoms started, Baker said. She took the second pill the next day, as directed. Thurman developed complications soon after taking the second pill. The NC clinic told ProPublica that if Thurman had lived nearby, they would have performed a D&C for free as soon as she followed up. Instead, on the evening of August 18, Thurman vomited blood and passed out at home. Her boyfriend called for an ambulance and Thurman arrived at Piedmont Henry Hospital at 6:51 p.m. You can read the ProPublica report to get all of the harrowing details — I keep using the word “harrowing” but there’s no other way to describe this — of what ensued at the hospital. In short, Thurman’s condition worsened and worsened throughout the night, and it’s clear that the hospital delayed and delayed performing the now-outlawed D&C procedure that could have saved Thurman’s life. Within Thurman’s first hours at the hospital, it should have been clear that she was in danger, medical experts told ProPublica. Her white blood cell count was critically high, her blood pressure was perilously low and she showed signs of sepsis. After displaying these deteriorating signs for three hours, an OB-GYN noted the possibility of doing a D&C the next day. Doctors discussed the possibility of doing a D&C again at 7:14 a.m., but that still didn’t happen. At 12:05 p.m., more than 17 hours after Thurman had arrived, a doctor who specializes in intensive care notified the OB-GYN that her condition was deteriorating. Thurman was finally taken to an operating room at 2 p.m. By then, the situation was so dire that doctors started with open abdominal surgery. They found that her bowel needed to be removed, but it was too risky to operate because not enough blood was flowing to the area — a possible complication from the blood pressure medication, an expert explained to ProPublica. The OB performed the D&C but immediately continued with a hysterectomy. During surgery, Thurman’s heart stopped. Georgia’s maternal mortality review committee concluded that there is a “good chance” that providing a D&C earlier could have prevented Thurman’s death. After reviewing Thurman’s case, the committee highlighted Piedmont’s “lack of policies/procedures in place to evacuate uterus immediately” and recommended all hospitals implement policies “to treat a septic abortion on an ongoing basis.” Although ProPublica reports that it’s “not clear” from the records available why doctors at Piedmont waited to provide a D&C to Thurman, despite discussing the procedure at least twice in the hours before they actually did, it seems fairly clear that the state’s abortion ban played a big part in this delayed treatment. Internal sources told ProPublica that Piedmont did not have a policy to guide doctors on how to interpret the state abortion ban when Thurman arrived for care, and ProPublica learned how difficult it is to interpret the vague and conflicting language in bans’ medical exceptions. THIS is what we should all be talking about right now. Not fake stories about immigrants eating cats and dogs, but how people like Amber Nicole Thurman have DIED due to Trump’s abortion bans. Thurman was a real person with a real life that was cut short because of Donald Trump and the pro-death Republican Party. We have to fight like HELL to end this madness and elect Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. Enough is ENOUGH. Note: ProPublica does great work and is a nonprofit news organization. If you can spare a few bucks, please help support their work. UPDATE Oliver Willis reports that Kamala Harris has made a powerful statement about Thurman’s death. UPDATE 2 I just discovered that Jen Psaki covered Thurman’s story with Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff on her show last night: [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/9/17/2270911/-ProPublica-reports-on-2-deaths-in-GA-soon-after-fall-of-Roe-due-to-abortion-ban-there-are-others?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=trending&pm_medium=web Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/