On the Death of Amber Thurman

Amber Thurman should not be dead.

Amber Thurman is a woman whose name has been all over the news. She was a young mother in Georgia with a six-year-old son she loved dearly. She wanted to go to nursing school. She’d just moved into a nice new apartment with a swimming pool, where she was excited to take her boy. When she found she was pregnant with twins,  Amber went to another state for an abortion and was given pills, and I’m not saying she should have taken them. That’s not my point at all. I’m saying she should still be alive.

Amber suffered a rare complication from those abortion pills: some dead fetal tissue was left in her body. Usually, the pills cause all of that to be expelled. She needed a dilation and curettage procedure to remove what was left of the babies, which were certainly already dead. They were rotting inside of her, causing sepsis.

A “D and C” is a surgical procedure to scrape tissue out of the uterus. It’s used for a surgical abortion, and I’m not saying it should be. But a D and C has many uses besides that.

A D and C is used to remove any tissue from a miscarriage that’s not passing normally. It’s used to remove tumors. It’s used to take a sample of the endometrium, to test for cancer.  I once nearly had to have one, when my endometrium was too thick from the poly-cystic ovary syndrome. Many women who have never had or considered abortion, have been helped by a D and C. D and C’s can save lives. Amber needed one to stop the sepsis.

Due to the wave of abortion bans after the Dobbs decision, D and C’s are illegal in Georgia, except in certain circumstances. Amber’s circumstance seems to have qualified her for one. It’s legal to perform the procedure to remove dead fetal tissue when there’s no cardiac activity, which there couldn’t have been in this case. But when she went to the hospital with an infection from that tissue, doctors opted to monitor her symptoms instead of performing the surgery.

All around the country, we’re told, medical professionals are choosing to monitor patients instead of perform surgery, if there’s a chance that someone will think they performed an illegal abortion. This is a thing that happens when abortion is illegal: doctors, and hospital bureaucracies, are choosing to wait until they deem a patient severely sick enough that they won’t get into trouble, instead of acting in the patient’s best interest right away. They are not choosing to help the patient in the hope that they can defend themselves in court if need be. They’re protecting their own interests first.  This is something we need to understand will happen, when abortion is banned. When abortion is banned, doctors will fear for themselves first and their patients next. And things like this will continue to happen.

How are we supposed to prevent this? I don’t know. Could lawmakers carefully word the statute in such a way that the doctor will always be given the benefit of the doubt? Could they include some nasty penalty in the statute, for a doctor who waits too long to make sure the baby is already dead before helping the mother? I couldn’t say. I’m not a doctor or a politician. All I know is, Amber’s D and C was delayed while they watched her get sicker. And it shouldn’t have been.

She was in pain. Her fever got worse and worse. She was terrified about what would happen to her son. After 20 hours of wasted time, Amber finally got that D and C. But by then, she was dead.

God rest her soul and comfort her poor son.

After ProPublica released the story of what happened to Amber Thurman, I saw the wave of predictable reactions. People were outraged, as well they might be. People blamed the abortion ban, which is reasonable– even though, as I said, the procedure that would have saved her is legal. It’s only a matter of the doctor who performs the procedure being able to prove he did it legally, in order to avoid going to jail, in case anyone asks any questions. It’s a matter of the hospital bureaucrats believing that saving this life won’t cost them any legal trouble.

And then I saw the wave of comments from pro-lifers all over the country. The same movement that swore to me that they only wanted to save babies and their poor mothers from being victims of abortion. The ones who said that post-abortive women were conned by evil physicians and need counseling and forgiveness, never punishment. The ones who swore that they would never hurt a woman. They were only trying to SAVE women, and their babies.

They were blaming Amber for her own death, because she’d gotten an abortion.

They were blaming her for taking those pills, which meant this was all her fault. She should have known better than to take pills with a rare side effect. And they were chiding everybody who expressed dismay that the letter of the law didn’t actually ban the D and C, which meant we weren’t allowed to be angry. They kept on saying “she shouldn’t have killed her babies,” in the same way they always say that a man murdered by a beat cop should have just complied.

I even saw pro-life Evangelical pastors praising God for her death, and for her damnation. They’re happy she’s dead, and they presume and hope she’ll suffer forever. Not a word for her son who is orphaned now. Not a word for how we can make things better.

Meanwhile, in America, since Dobbs, abortion rates continue to rise.

ProPublica has promised to release more stories of women who died in a similar way to Amber. I’m sure they’ll have equally nice things to say about that.

I thought I knew the pro-life movement.

I thought they stood for life.

Mary Pezzulo is the author of Meditations on the Way of the Cross, The Sorrows and Joys of Mary, and Stumbling into Grace: How We Meet God in Tiny Works of Mercy.