Abortion deaths: It’s not the bans. It’s the doctors
Caroline MolloyColumnist Michelle Goldberg declared in a New York Times opinion piece on Monday, “It Was Only a Matter of Time Before Abortion Bans Killed Someone.” She blamed the law. She’s wrong.
Goldberg details the story of Georgia resident Amber Nicole Thurman and her unborn twins, who died on August 19, 2022, after Thurman attempted a chemical abortion without medical supervision.
The villain in Goldberg’s telling is Georgia’s “Living Infants Fairness and Equity Act,” which states that “no abortion shall be performed if the unborn child has a detectable human heartbeat.”
Thurman attempted to procure an abortion in Georgia, but her children’s heartbeats prevented her. She drove hours to a clinic in North Carolina, which refused her surgical abortion but offered her the chemical abortion drugs mifepristone and misoprostol to bring back home. She did so and suffered complications, and her local doctors delayed treatment until it was too late to save her. The twins were already dead.
Investigating Thurman’s death, doctors and lawyers concluded it had been “entirely preventable.”
