Kamala Harris holds an emotional event on the topic of Candi Miller and Amber Nicole Thurman, both of whom died because the Trump Abortion Ban prevented them from getting the care they needed.
Vice-president speaks after news breaks that two women died after being unable to access procedure legally
Carter Sherman at The Guardian:
In her first speech dedicated exclusively to abortion rights since becoming the presidential nominee, Kamala Harris spoke on Friday afternoon in Atlanta, Georgia, blaming Donald Trump for the abortion bans that now blanket much of the United States.
Harris spoke days after news broke that two Georgia mothers died after being unable to access legal abortions and adequate medical care in the state.
“Two women – and those are only the stories we know – here in the state of Georgia, died, died, because of a Trump abortion ban,” Harris said. She repeatedly referred to “Trump abortion bans” in the speech.
“Suffering is happening every day in our country,” Harris continued. “To those women, to those families – I say on behalf on what I believe we all say, we see you and you are not alone and we are all here standing with you.”
In the weeks since becoming the Democratic nominee for president, Harris has made reproductive rights a central part of her campaign. She has toured the country to highlight the healthcare consequences of the 2022 overturning of Roe v Wade, which paved the way for more than a dozen states to ban almost all abortions.
On Friday, Harris blamed the former president for Roe’s demise because Trump appointed three of the supreme court justices who overturned the landmark decision. She also also condemned Republicans for repeatedly blocking Senate bills that would have guaranteed a federal right to in vitro fertilization, a popular fertility treatment that had its future cast into doubt after Roe’s overturning.
“On the one hand, these extremists want to tell women they don’t have the freedom to end an unwanted pregnancy,” Harris said. “On the other hand, these extremists are telling women and their parents they don’t have the freedom to start a family.”
The raucous crowd grumbled loudly at Harris’s words. “Make it make sense!” someone shouted.
Although Joe Biden won Georgia in the 2020 presidential election, becoming the first Democrat in decades to take the state, Democrats seemed unlikely to recapture it until Harris replaced Biden as nominee. Now, Georgia is once again a swing state. Lindsey Graham, the Republican senator from South Carolina and a major Trump surrogate, has said that Trump must win Georgia if he wants to win the White House. Meanwhile, Harris in August embarked on a two-day bus tour of the state and giving her first major network interview there.
The deaths of the Georgia mothers, Amber Nicole Thurman and Candi Miller, were first reported earlier this week by ProPublica and occurred after Georgia enacted a six-week abortion ban. Georgia’s maternal mortality review committee looked at both women’s cases and deemed their deaths “preventable”, according to ProPublica.
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“Under the Trump abortion ban, her doctors could have faced up to a decade in prison for providing Amber the care she needed,” Harris said on Friday. “Understand what a law like this means. Doctors have to wait until the patient is at death’s door before they take action.”
Harris met with Thurman’s mother and sisters on Thursday night. “Their pain is heartbreaking,” she said.
During Friday’s speech in Atlanta, Georgia, Vice President and 2024 Democratic Presidential nominee Kamala Harris excoriated Donald Trump for his role in allowing abortion bans to take effect in several states including Georgia and Missouri as a result of appointing three right-wing judicial activists onto SCOTUS to overturn Roe as a result of the Dobbs ruling.
See Also:
HuffPost: Kamala Harris To Women Denied Abortion Care After Roe: 'We See You And You Are Not Alone'
Vox: Kamala Harris and Oprah humanized the consequences of state abortion bans
Abortion, Every Day: Kamala Harris’ Abortion Speech Broke New Ground
Candi Miller’s family said she didn't visit a doctor “due to the current legislation on pregnancies and abortions.” Maternal health experts
Republicans are killing women on purpose. They knew this would happen. They know it's happening now. They do not care. It will keep happening as long as they have any power at all at the federal and state level.
Thurman died after waiting 20 hours for emergency care under the state’s abortion ban. Sen. Ron Wyden demanded records his committee could r
This is a different case in the same state. I'm putting them in the same post because I feel like there's a pattern and something needs to be done.
To read Candi Miller’s or Amber Thurman’s story is to realize how little has changed.
Twenty-eight-year-old Amber Thurman took abortion pills but did not completely expel the fetal tissue from her body. She developed a serious infection and went to the hospital, where physicians would ordinarily have performed a dilation and curettage to remove the remaining tissue. In Thurman’s case, however, physicians failed to act for roughly 20 hours. They waited to operate until the situation was dire, and Thurman died.
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Candi Miller, a mother of three, suffered from lupus, diabetes, and hypertension, and she was warned that her health was so fragile that she might not survive another pregnancy. When she accidentally became pregnant again, she ordered abortion pills online. Like Thurman, Miller didn’t entirely expel the fetal tissue and developed a serious infection. But Miller did not seek out care. Her family reported that she was aware of Georgia’s criminal abortion law and afraid of what would happen if she sought emergency care. Her husband found her unresponsive in bed, her 3-year-old daughter at her side.
In a letter, the state’s public health commissioner said the action was taken because “confidential information provided to the Maternal Mor
Amy Yurkanin at ProPublica:
Georgia officials have dismissed all members of a state committee charged with investigating deaths of pregnant women. The move came in response to ProPublica having obtained internal reports detailing two deaths.
ProPublica reported in September on the deaths of Amber Thurman and Candi Miller, which the state maternal mortality review committee had determined were preventable. They were the first reported cases of women who died without access to care restricted by a state abortion ban, and they unleashed a torrent of outrage over the fatal consequences of such laws. The women’s stories became a central discussion in the presidential campaign and ballot initiatives involving abortion access in 10 states.
“Confidential information provided to the Maternal Mortality Review Committee was inappropriately shared with outside individuals,” Dr. Kathleen Toomey, commissioner of the state Department of Public Health, wrote in a letter dated Nov. 8 and addressed to members of the committee. “Even though this disclosure was investigated, the investigation was unable to uncover which individual(s) disclosed confidential information.
“Therefore, effective immediately the current MMRC is disbanded, and all member seats will be filled through a new application process.”
A health department spokesperson declined to comment on the decision to dismiss the committee, saying that the letter, which the department provided to ProPublica, “speaks for itself.” Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp’s office also declined to comment, referring questions to the health department.
Under Georgia law, the work of the maternal mortality review committee is confidential, and members must sign confidentiality agreements. Those members see only summaries of medical records stripped of personal details, and their findings on individual cases are not supposed to be shared with the public — not even with hospitals or with family members of women who died.
The health department’s letter states that there could be new steps to keep the board’s deliberations from public view. The letter said officials might change “other procedures for on-boarding committee members better ensuring confidentiality, committee oversight and MMRC organizational structure.”
Maternal mortality review committees exist in every state. They are tasked with examining deaths of women during a pregnancy or up to a year after and determining whether they could have been prevented.
Georgia’s had 32 standing members from a variety of backgrounds, including OB-GYNs, cardiologists, mental health care providers, a medical examiner, health policy experts and community advocates. They are volunteer positions that pay a small honorarium.
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Reproductive rights advocates say Georgia’s decision to dismiss and restructure its committee also could have a chilling effect on the committee’s work, potentially dissuading its members from delving as deeply as they have into the circumstances of pregnant women’s deaths if it could be politically sensitive.
After ProPublica reported on the deaths of two Georgia women as a result of the state’s stringent abortion ban, the state government made the politically-motivated move to shutter the Maternal Mortality Review Committee.
'Pro-family’ politicians and lobbyists spent years carefully, strategically, and callously planning for our deaths
Jessica Valenti at Abortion, Every Day:
Since the end of Roe, we’ve watched women arrested for miscarriages, children forced to give birth, cancer patients denied care, and women stripped of vital reproductive organs. We’ve seen women die.
We now live in a country where hospitals routinely turn away miscarrying patients, and OBGYNs advise pregnant women to get insurance to cover helicopter flights in case they need emergency care that would be illegal in their home state.
All this, so a handful of conservative men can proudly declare themselves protectors of ‘life’. Whose lives, I wonder, are they protecting? Certainly not ours.
The political leaders tasked to safeguard us instead fight to deny women emergency abortions or pass laws that require us to become paralyzed and infertile rather than end a pregnancy. Even the deaths of women and infants aren’t enough to spur empathy: Since Texas passed its abortion ban, for example, infant mortality jumped by nearly 13% and maternal mortality increased by 56%.
How many mothers are they willing to kill in the name of being ‘pro-family’?
Because let’s be clear: anti-abortion politicians and lobbyists knew women would die if they overturned Roe, and they did it anyway. They spent years carefully, strategically, and callously planning for our deaths. I mean that literally.
Republicans are appointing anti-abortion extremists to maternal mortality review committees or disbanding these boards altogether. At the same time, anti-abortion organizations are sowing distrust in credible maternal death data, while Republicans pass laws that artificially inflate abortion ‘complication’ rates—efforts designed to make it seem that abortion is killing women, rather than the laws prohibiting it.
In fact, there’s an entire cottage industry devoted to hiding how deadly abortion bans are—from anti-choice ‘experts’ who testify in legislative hearings to the organizations churning out dubious studies that conservative lawmakers can use as ‘proof’ that abortion bans are perfectly safe. The tactic I think about most, though, is the one I warned about just over two years ago.
In October 2022, I reported that anti-abortion lawmakers and activists were testing out a new talking point in anticipation of the first reported post-Dobbs death. Prompted by stories of burst ectopic pregnancies and women left bleeding for days, Republicans knew it was only a matter of time before someone died. So they decided to get ahead of the inevitable.
Suddenly, anti-abortion legislators, activists, and conservative pundits began claiming—almost in unison—that abortion bans don’t stop doctors from providing care. Instead, they insisted women were being denied care because pro-choicers had frightened medical professionals and their lawyers into misreading the laws. “In other words, they set the world on fire and want to blame the people pointing out that it’s burning,” I wrote at the time.
Today, this is the exact anti-abortion response to the deaths of Candi Miller and Amber Nicole Thurman. Legislators and activists alike claim that it’s pro-choice “fearmongering and lies” about anti-abortion laws that killed the two women.
We’re supposed to believe—despite a determination from Georgia’s maternal mortality review committee and two years of horror stories—that these deaths have nothing to do with abortion bans. That hospital lawyers across the country don’t know how to do their jobs, and that the laws anti-abortion activists spent decades drafting aren’t being interpreted exactly as intended. Come on.
It’s not a coincidence that these messages are echoed, almost verbatim, by conservative media. (When I say this is all by design, I mean it.)
The Washington Examiner has blamed “abortion disinformation” for Thurman and Miller’s deaths, while the Wall Street Journal accused Vice President Kamala Harris of “exploiting” a tragedy that had nothing to do with abortion bans. A Fox News article claimed that Georgia doctors were speaking out against “misinformation” about the state’s ban—but it turned out to be an interview of two Republican lawmakers who happened to be doctors.
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Anti-abortion lawmakers and activists think they can distance themselves from what they’ve done to American women—horrors they meticulously planned and continue to try to cover up. They need us to forget or accept what’s been clear every day since Roe was overturned.
I don’t know about you, I’m not willing to do either.
Jessica Valenti’s Abortion, Every Day Substack has spot-on analysis that abortion bans championed by anti-abortion activists who have the gall to call themselves “pro-family” under the guise of “protecting the unborn” kill women.
Challenges of Providing Emergency Care on Christmas: A Reflection on Pregnancy Loss and Healthcare Access
Christmas in the Emergency Room
On one memorable Christmas, I found myself on call as the obstetrician-gynecologist at my hospital. It was a time meant for family and celebration, yet I was summoned to the emergency department to attend to a patient experiencing a first-trimester pregnancy loss. While early pregnancy losses are relatively common and often uncomplicated, this particular case…
