What does it mean to Americans when a woman dies?

First Preventable Abortion-Related Death Reported in Modern America

“Bleeding and in pain, Kyleigh Thurman didn’t know her doomed pregnancy could kill her. Emergency room doctors at Ascension Seton Williamson in Texas handed her a pamphlet on miscarriage and told her to “let nature take its course” before discharging her without treatment for her ectopic pregnancy.” AP

What does it mean to Americans when a woman dies during pregnancy? Do we actually care? Do we engage in law making and political decision making with a default posture of … not wanting women to die? 

Because women are dying right now under circumstances where doctors should  be able to save their lives. 

Are we going to allow this? This is reality, not some political spin and we are the ones who have to keep the conversations going. This is something we have to be talking about every single day. 

In the past two years, more than 100 pregnant patients in need have been turned away or mistreated at hospitals, and none of those hospitals have faced penalties from the federal government. “Two women — one in Florida and one in Texas — were left to miscarry in public restrooms. In Arkansas, a woman went into septic shock and her fetus died after an emergency room sent her home. At least four other women with ectopic pregnancies had trouble getting treatment, including one in California who needed a blood transfusion after she sat for nine hours in an emergency waiting room.” AP

Even though termination of ectopic pregnancy is an exception to the abortion ban in Texas law, doctors who face 99 years of prison are scared to treat patients. Conclusively diagnosing an ectopic pregnancy isn’t always 100%, and while anti-choice advocates claim that they will never punish a doctor who made a mistake, physicians are sending women home to come back another day. 

Amber Nicole Thurman and her son in a photo she posted on social media the year before her death

A recent ProPublica investigation found that at least two women in Georgia died because they couldn’t access legal abortions. Doctors waited for 20 hours while an infection spread through the body of Amber Nicole Thurman, and by the time they started surgery it was too late.  A team of experts, including 10 doctors, reviewed her case and deemed it “preventable,” stating the delay had a large impact on her fatal outcome.  ProPublica says it is the first time an abortion-related death that is officially deemed preventable has been publicly reported in post-Roe modern America. 

Republican-crafted laws  “pit doctors’ fears of prosecution against their patients’ health needs, requiring providers to make sure their patient was inarguably on the brink of death or facing “irreversible” harm when they intervened with procedures like a D&C.” 

A recent piece in The Atlantic described in detail what draconian abortion bans and laws are doing to doctors who have to choose between saving a patient's life or possibly sending their entire medical care team to prison.

“In the two-plus years since Roe was overturned, a handful of studies have cataloged the moral distress of doctors across the country. In one, 96 percent of providers who care for pregnant women in states with restrictive laws reported feelings of moral distress that ranged from “uncomfortable” to “intense” to “worst possible.” In a survey of ob-gyns who mostly were not abortion providers, more than 90 percent said the laws had prevented them or their colleagues from providing standard medical care. They described feeling “muzzled,” “handcuffed,” and “straitjacketed.” In another study, ob‑gyn residents reported feeling like “puppets,” a “hypocrite,” or a “robot of the State” under the abortion bans.”

The National Women’s Law Center recently filed complaints with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services on behalf of Mylissa Farmer, who was told by the Freeman Health System in Joplin, Missouri, that her fetus would not survive, “that her amniotic fluid had emptied and that she was at risk for serious infection or losing her uterus, but they would not terminate the pregnancy because a fetal heartbeat was still detectable.” But let’s be clear, finding a lawyer, filing a complaint with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, having that complaint investigated, going to the Office of the Inspector General to identify penalties, and more - that’s not a solution to the problem faced by women like Mylissa. 

The Biden administration has sent letters to hospitals reminding them they face penalties  up to $129,232 per violation or loss of Medicare funding for not providing pregnant women care. And they have a new website for patients to file a complaint.  They’ve also filed suit against states like Idaho for passing laws that are incompatible with emergency room obligations to provide stabilizing care. 

As I talked about on IG last week, this summer the Supreme Court heard a case about just this issue: where the legal line when a pregnant woman at the ER is deserving of healthcare.  In an extremely rare move, the court essentially said oopsie-daisy, and decided to not decide on the case, sending it back to the lower courts. This means that for the women of America, the Supreme Court still has the power to decided when a woman is sufficiently close to death to deserve healthcare. 

In his dissent over sending the case back down to the  lower courts, Justice Alito went into great detail about the equation he would use to balance a woman’s medical condition with a fetus’s gestational week. How he would figure out when the line between a woman who might die versus will die could be crossed.   

A woman’s life is not an equation. Doctors know that, even anti-choice doctors, many of whom say they also feel hamstrung about providing life saving care that they never ever equated with abortion until two years ago.

From the Atlantic piece:

“The doctors I spoke with had a wide range of personal views on abortion, but they uniformly agreed that the current restrictions are unworkable as medical care. They have watched patients grow incredulous, even angry, upon learning of their limited options. But mostly, their patients are devastated. The bans have added heartbreak on top of heartbreak, forcing women grieving the loss of an unborn child to endure delayed care and unnecessary injury. For some doctors, this has been too much to bear. They have fled to states without bans, leaving behind even fewer doctors to care for patients in places like Idaho.”

This election will decide the future here. Make no mistake. 

The authors of Project 2025 are very clear that they will push the Trump administration to stop helping pregnant women in these situations: end all the investigations into hospitals refusing to provide abortion care, stop any enforcement that requires emergency rooms to provide women stabilizing care, and don’t bring any lawsuits to force states to reconcile their laws that lead to women’s death’s with the reality of doctor’s obligations. (pg. 473)

In this election we have the opportunity to do two things, (1) elect politicians who will actually act to protect reproductive freedom at the national level, and (2) finally fix the messaging flaws that the left has made in the reproductive rights movement. 

For too long Democrats have been on the defensive when it comes to women’s reproductive health and abortion. Meanwhile the conservatives have been heavy on the offense and it really paid off for them. 

We now need to lead with a message rooted in our values: A WOMAN’S LIFE SHOULD NOT BE TREATED AS EXCEPTIONS UNDER THE LAW. Rather, the law should assume that saving women’s lives is the norm. 

Merely beating Trump is a necessary thing, because if empowered he will use the Comstack act to make abortion nationally inaccessible. To pass a law protecting reproductive rights we need to elect Kamala Harris, a filibuster-proof Democratic Senate AND  a Democratic House.

Every single seat and vote will count. 

Then of course, we will need to find a way to fix the balance on the Supreme Court and do a ton of work in state legislatures.  (I’ve removed the payway on my Substack about exctly how we fix the Supreme Court, you can find it here.)

Women are being treated like we are expendable in this country and conservatives seem to believe that a useful woman is either a mother or a dead one. 

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