This week, ProPublica released two studies tracing the deaths of two women to Georgia’s six-week abortion ban—the first to be reported since the reversal of Roe v. Wade. 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.
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.
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I understand that I come from a place of pretty significant privilege, but it is wild to me that when faced with these kinds of situations anyone is gambling on the kinds of medical care they might/might not be able to receive in these red states with restrictive abortion laws.
I know that if any of my friends, even if we’re not particularly close, came to me and said they needed me to drive them halfway across the country for an abortion because they may not be able to get life-saving medical care in our state if something goes wrong, we’re going, right then and there, no questions asked, I’m calling out sick from work, running up my credit cards on gas and hotel rooms and whatever else we may need and we’re hitting the road, and if needed I won’t ever breathe a word of it to anyone.
The fact that people are in a position where they feel like they can’t do that or don’t have people they think they can trust to do that for them is maddening.
So, in cases like Ectopic Pregnancies, time is of the essence. By the time you’ve driven halfway across the country to get an abortion, you’ve already done permanent damage to your reproductive system.
Also, I think one of the other main contributing factors is that physicians are afraid to diagnose because a misdiagnosis to be on the safe side results in jail time for them. So quite often, by the time you know you need to drive across the country it’s already too late.