Fact Check: Are Pro-Life Laws Killing Young Women? Here's the Truth
The tragic death of Amber Thurman has become a political football — and one the left has been running with quite shamelessly during the 2024 election cycle as proof that overturning Roe v. Wade has cost women their lives.
Thurman, a resident of Georgia, had “taken abortion pills and encountered a rare complication; she had not expelled all of the fetal tissue from her body,” a ProPublica report from September alleged.
“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,” the report claimed. “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.” Thus, an otherwise healthy 28-year-old died.
The result of draconian abortion laws passed in the wake of the Dobbs decision in 2022? That’s how the Democrats and pro-abortion forces have been spinning it.
Women & girls’ lives are at stake! When you vote for Democrats you vote to protect those you love because lives are at stake, precious women’s lives like those of Amber Thurman & Candi Miller who died because of abortion bans. Vote!#WeWinWithWomen2024 pic.twitter.com/T06gsBABig
— Malena-PRO-CHOICE🟦🟧Fighting Tyranny! (@tweetMalena) September 30, 2024
The mother of Amber Nicole Thurman, who died after not receiving urgent care needed for an infection under Georgia’s extreme abortion ban, speaks out: “I want you to know Amber was not a statistic” pic.twitter.com/S30ZcmQ571
— Kamala HQ (@KamalaHQ) September 20, 2024
The narrative has also been advanced by none other than Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Kamala Harris’ running mate, who said on Fox News that “states like Georgia force women to cross the border, and then we have a death of Amber Thurman.”
But Walz was on Fox News, where host Shannon Bream shared an uncomfortable truth: Even Thurman’s family doesn’t blame the Georgia law, they blame medical malpractice for her death:
JUST IN: Tim Walz gets fact-checked on Fox News after he tries claiming Georgia woman Amber Thurman died because she had to drive over state lines for an abortion.
Walz: “States like Georgia force women to cross the border and then we have the de*th of Amber Thurman.”
Shannon… pic.twitter.com/IqQ0YuT4UY
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) October 6, 2024
Thurman has become the latest talking point in a dubious claim that the data just doesn’t support: Otherwise healthy women are dying because of pro-life laws.
First, the tragic death of Amber Thurman, explained in more than desultory detail. As a report in The Federalist noted, Thurman was prescribed the drugs mifepristone and misoprostol by a North Carolina abortionist. As you may notice, that’s not the state where she died.
Democrats have led efforts to ease up on the safety requirements that accompanied the Food and Drug Administration’s 2000 approval of mifepristone specifically because of cases like Thurman’s. The FDA set a seven-week gestational limit for the drug to be prescribed. Furthermore, women were required see a physician in person before the pill was prescribed. Then, they had to see a physician after the abortion was completed to ensure that the uterus had fully emptied and bleeding had stopped.
“But thanks to Democrat efforts to relax safety requirements for abortion pills, important safeguards no longer apply,” The Federalist’s report noted. And if those safeguards had been in place — specifically, seeing the doctor after the abortion was completed to ensure that the aborted fetus had fully left the body — it’s quite likely Thurman would still be alive.
Furthermore, while Georgia’s law prohibits doctors from carrying out abortions, in Thurman’s case, the abortion had already been carried out: “‘Abortion’ means the act of using, prescribing, or administering any instrument, substance, device, or other means with the purpose to terminate a pregnancy with knowledge that termination will, with reasonable likelihood, cause the death of an unborn child.” That child was already dead. Ergo, performing a D&C was a straightforward medical decision that would not be illegal and certainly wouldn’t have raised any red flags.
Yet, ProPublica’s report deliberately misrepresented the language of the law, which has led to many of the misconceptions behind Thurman’s death. Here is how the author of that report represented it:
It prohibits doctors from using any instrument “with the purpose of terminating a pregnancy.” While removing fetal tissue is not terminating a pregnancy, medically speaking, the law only specifies it’s not considered an abortion to remove “a dead unborn child” that resulted from a “spontaneous abortion” defined as “naturally occurring” from a miscarriage or a stillbirth.
By refusing to quote the law in full, ProPublica’s reporting left open to ambiguity what simply isn’t ambiguous: a D&C procedure, in Thurman’s case, would have been not only legal but the soundest course of action. No law prevented them from doing it.
But Amber Thurman is a single case, or datum. Liberals — including, yes, Gov. Walz — have made claims that various studies prove that maternal mortality is up because of laws that criminalize abortion.
“We have seen maternal mortality skyrocket in Texas, outpacing many other countries in the world,” Walz said during the vice presidential debate.
What Walz was referencing was a study by the Gender Equity Policy Institute, which claimed maternal mortality was up by 56 percent between 2019 and 2022. However, as Catholic University of America professor Michael J. New pointed out in a September article for National Review, there are several major issues with this finding, both in terms of the group that harnessed the data and what the data actually showed.
“First, the Gender Equity Policy Institute has not released its full report and has only released a very limited amount of data. Additionally, the Gender Equity Policy Institute has no previous background either collecting or analyzing maternal-mortality data from Texas or elsewhere,” New noted.
In addition: “Taking the data at face value, their report indicates that the maternal-mortality rate in Texas actually declined by 35 percent between 2021 and 2022. In 2022, the Texas Heartbeat Act had already taken effect.
“Shortly after the Dobbs decision that summer, Texas started enforcing a pro-life law that largely protected all preborn children. In short, during the year with the strongest pro-life protections in place, the rate of maternal mortality in Texas actually fell by 35 percent,” he continued. “Furthermore, any reported increase between 2019 and 2021 could have been due to Covid-19 or other factors.”
New also noted that this isn’t the first time that data has been skewed to make it look like pro-life policies endanger the life of the mother.
In 2016, for instance, a report from the journal Obstetrics and Gynecology claimed that the maternal-mortality rate in the Lone Star State doubled in the years between 2010 and 2012, with the media inferring that state budget cuts to Planned Parenthood were to blame.
Two problems, as New noted: First, “This was despite the fact that the purported maternal-mortality increase occurred before the funding cuts took effect.” Second, “a state task force that reviewed individual death certificates found that many of the pregnancy related deaths were miscounted. Overall, the Texas maternal-mortality rate in 2012 was more than 61 percent lower than what was reported in the 2016 Obstetrics and Gynecology article.”
Furthermore, New also wrote a separate analysis for National Review in March in which he pointed to “a study published in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology [which] found that high and rising rates of maternal mortality in the United States are due to flawed data.
“Starting in 2003, a pregnancy checkbox was included in the national death certificates. Researchers found that this box was checked for many deaths unrelated to either pregnancy or childbirth,” he wrote. “While previous data found that the U.S. maternal-mortality rate increased by a whopping 143 percent since 1999, these new data found that there was only a 2 percent increase since that time.”
In short, both in individual cases like the death of Amber Thurman and in a wider picture of maternal mortality, the evidence for the claims being made by Democrats and media outlets that pro-life laws are killing women is entirely lacking. If anything, Thurman’s death was the result of the relaxation of abortion restrictions, not the tightening of them. And, as for the numbers, they provide no clear case for pro-life laws killing women, no matter what politicians might claim. Instead, this seems to be a scare tactic designed to manipulate young female voters. The problem is the number of reporters and media personalities willing to parrot untruths or unbacked claims.
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