Amber Nicole Thurman’s death from an infection in 2022 is believed to be the first confirmed maternal fatality linked to post-Roe bans.
Reproductive justice advocates have been warning for more than two years that the end of Roe v. Wade would lead to surge in maternal mortality among patients denied abortion care—and that the increase was likely to be greatest among low-income women of color. Now, a new report by ProPublica has uncovered the first such verified death. A 28-year-old medical assistant and Black single mother in Georgia died from a severe infection after a hospital delayed a routine medical procedure that had been outlawed under that state’s six-week abortion ban.
Amber Nicole Thurman’s death, in August 2022, was officially deemed “preventable” by a state committee tasked with reviewing pregnancy-related deaths. Thurman’s case is the first time a preventable abortion-related death has come to public attention since the Supreme Court overturned Roe, ProPublica’s Kavitha Surana reported.
Now, “we actually have the substantiated proof of something we already knew—that abortion bans kill people,” said Mini Timmaraju, president of the abortion-rights group Reproductive Freedom for All, during a call with media. “It cannot go on.”
This ignores that, until we had an effective treatment program and mass vaccinations, it had a mortality rate of about 20 times that of the flu. After effective treatment plans, vaccines, antivirals, etc. it was brought more in line with the flu. 0.5% mortality means that you need to know 200 people who got sick to know someone who died. This also ignores all the people we saw online who would deny their family members died of COVID. Having had friends working in hospitals, COVID deaths were happening. And let’s be honest, how many people have you personally run into who died of the flu, yet that happens every year. We just shrug and move on. They were old, it was their time. And if it was your child, it was devastating, but could you even relate if your friend’s infant had died of the flu?
People historically are really bad at statistical analysis, so tiny risks over huge occurrences are dismissed, and most people will get away with it so we feel like the bad outcomes didn’t happen at all. But they do, and they did, and now a lot more people died than had to because people couldn’t stay home when they were sick, or wear a mask in public, or not cough in other people’s faces because it’s just a flu. And I honestly can’t show any respect to people who think their life is so much more important than anyone else’s that they can’t show a little respect and just try to not risk a stranger’s health because it might be a little uncomfortable.