Four Hours from Disaster
I had the procedure that could have saved Amber Thurman's life
I live less than four hours from suburban Atlanta, where Amber Thurman died. One month ago, I had the procedure that could have saved her life. Here’s the difference between us: I live in a state where abortion is still legal. She did not.
As ProPublica journalist Kavitha Surana reported last week, Thurman was a 28-year-old single mom. In 2022, she decided to have an abortion when she discovered she was pregnant with twins. Since abortion had just been outlawed in Georgia, she drove to a clinic in North Carolina, where she was given medication that would end her pregnancy. She then suffered an extremely rare complication in which some fetal tissue failed to leave her body, causing a severe infection.
To remove the tissue, she needed a dilation and curettage, or D&C. It’s often used after a miscarriage to remove any unwanted material from the lining of the uterus. But doctors delayed giving it to Thurman until it was too late. She died during the surgery, leaving behind a 6-year-old son.
It’s unclear why Thurman’s doctors postponed giving her the D&C. Surana suggested the hospital may have been afraid of repercussions due to the vague wording of the state’s abortion ban. The law contains a exception allowing abortions to be performed to “prevent the death of a pregnant woman.” But how close does she have to be to dying?
When it comes to a D&C, Surana wrote:
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. Thurman had told doctors her miscarriage was not spontaneous — it was the result of taking pills to terminate her pregnancy.
In other words, it would have been legal for doctors to save Thurman’s life if she had a miscarriage. But since she chose to end her pregnancy, she died.
Here’s what gets lost in the abortion wars: There can be a very fuzzy line between pregnant and not pregnant. And outlawing one medical procedure can have consequences for all women, pregnant or not.
In 2018, I had a miscarriage. The bleeding started when I was five weeks pregnant. Most people don’t even know they’re pregnant at that stage; I only knew because I was trying to conceive and tested myself constantly.
The nurses at my fertility clinic tried to convince me it was normal—the bleeding wasn’t heavy, such things happen in early pregnancy. Only a hormone test could determine for certain if the pregnancy was ending rather than beginning. I waited days for the results, sobbing while I bled.
Today, if I lived in Georgia instead of North Carolina, I would have been subject to a different kind of ordeal. Would I have to prove the miscarriage was “spontaneous”? Would I have been too frightened to find out?
It’s ludicrous to assume most women will discover a pregnancy in time to end it before six weeks. It’s also ludicrous to ignore the fact that 10 to 25 percent of pregnancies end in miscarriage, and the number increases as you age. Scaring women away from seeking medical care when that happens is criminal. So is barring them from receiving life-saving care at any time, before or after a pregnancy.
Which leads me to the D&C I had last month.
I went to my OB’s office for a routine procedure called a hysteroscopy (which I wrote about here). The plan was to remove a blob of scar tissue in my uterus—left over from a C-section—that was causing some random bleeding. While she was in there, my doctor also wanted to scrape the endometrial lining to remove any excess tissue or polyps that might be causing problems. That scraping constitutes a D&C.
Right before I went into surgery, the doctor looked at my chart and realized I hadn’t taken a pregnancy test. She insisted I pee in a cup, saying she couldn’t proceed without knowing for sure that I wasn’t pregnant. Now I know why. She didn’t want to be prosecuted for accidentally performing an abortion.
I was safe; the test showed I was not beginning or ending a pregnancy. But I know the pain of both, and can tell you this: Medically, there’s very little difference between a “spontaneous” abortion and one that’s planned. Except in one case, Georgia’s politicians think the mother’s life is worth saving, and in the other, they don’t.
Wow. This is an eye-opener.
Learned from this. That distinction is outrageous.