Tag: roe v wade
Two Georgia Moms Were The First Women Killed By Abortion Bans

Two Georgia Moms Were The First Women Killed By Abortion Bans

Amber Thurman was a beautiful 28 year-old single mom in Atlanta with a beaming smile and an adorable six year -old son. She was a medical assistant with big plans to become a nurse.

But on August 20, 2022 she was dead, her uterus ravaged by a sepsis infection from an incomplete abortion. For 20 hours doctors at an Atlanta hospital delayed providing her with a life-saving dilation and curettage (D&C) procedure. By the time surgeons got her into the operating room, they were racing to try to save her life.

Just two weeks before that, Georgia’s Governor Brian Kemp had. signed the state’s new “Heartbeat” abortion ban into law and announced that he was “overjoyed” that the ban would keep Georgia women “safe” and “healthy.”

Abortions could no longer be practiced in the state after a fetal heartbeat was detected, usually around six weeks, unless a woman was a victim of rape or incest or at risk of dying. The criminal penalty for medical providers who didn’t adhere to the strict guidelines was up to 10 years in prison and the revocation of their medical licenses.

The result for for Amber who arrived by ambulance after vomiting up blood and passing out at home, was that she didn’t didn’t quickly receive what had just recently been a routine D & C to clear her uterus. Her case was now a frightening hot potato for the doctors at the hospital.

Was she close enough to death to meet the new law’s requirement when her white blood count and her blood pressure fell dangerously low? How about when antibiotics weren’t enough to curb her “acute sepsis’ infection? Or when she became at risk for bleeding out? Or when her vital organs began to fail?

When was she close enough to death to qualify for a legal abortion under Georgia’s ban?

By the time the hospital physicians believed they were meeting the new law’s standard, Amber died on the operating table.

This loving young mother tragically became the first known American woman to die from a Trump abortion ban less than two months after Roe v. Wade was overturned on June 24, 2022 by the Supreme Court’s conservative majority.

It only took two months.

However, her “preventable” death has just now became public more than two years later, when the ProPublica news outlet published the news after they obtained a report from the official Georgia state committee which investigates maternal deaths.

The committee which reports to the state’s Department of Health conducted a two year examination of the circumstances of Amber’s death which followed a rare complication from her two-pill abortion medication regime.

She received the pills when she drove to a North Carolina clinic four hours away, where abortion was still legal. Only 32 deaths have been linked to medication abortion pills between 2000 and 2022 and almost 6,000,000 American women have used them. They are considered safer than Viagra.

Unfortunately in Amber’s case, the pills failed to expel all the fetal contents from her uterus. It’s because the young woman didn’t receive the known standard of care -- the D & C -- quickly for her dire condition that the committee ruled that her death was “preventable.”

Now make no mistake -- this is what America’s women and those who love them must accept. Abortions bans cause young, healthy women to die. Death is now a risk for ANY pregnancy in the 22 states that have enacted the Trump bans.

And if the former president is re-elected on November 5, death will be a chance that every woman of reproductive age will take in America every time she decides to get pregnant or accidentally becomes pregnant.

That’s because Donald Trump -- no matter how many times he tries to confuse you about his stance on abortion -- WILL end it nationally, just as his Christian nationalist and evangelical followers have demanded.

You must have noticed how Trump is proudly crowing that HE’s The One who was able to “kill Roe V Wade” after 50 years. HE’s the one who appointed the three ultra right ring judges that he knew would do it. He promised to do it and he did!

If Trump and ‘pro life’ zealot JD Vance are elected, abortion in America is over.

If the pair can do it legislatively they will. If not, they’ll follow their Project 2025 handbook and ‘backdoor’ their ban. Their compliant Justice Department will enforce the 1873 Comstock Act, preventing the transportation of any abortion medications or surgical equipment across state lines.

Then on top of that, Trump’s obedient appointed FDA chief will withdraw the abortions pills as well as several forms of popular birth control from the market.

Done.

Women like Amber and Texans Amanda Zurawski, Kate Cox, Dr. Austin Dennard, and Madysyn Anderson, Tennessean Allie Phillips and Floridian Anya Cook and millions of women in the 22 Trump abortion ban states already know what it’s like to have no right to make decisions about their bodies.

They’ve been forced to flee to other states for abortions of unviable babies to save their own lives. They’ve lost their fertility after sepsis ravaged their reproductive organs when their water broke at 18 weeks. They’ve been left to bleed out in public restrooms after miscarriages until they were close enough to death for doctors to legally treat them .

Meanwhile in Amber’s state of Georgia, OBGYNs are practicing “under an element of fear," as Dr. Didi Saint Louis, an Atlanta OBGYN, confirms to me. “You don’t know what situation you might encounter that could land you in jail or cause you to lose your medical license.”

“I shouldn’t have to be fearing that I will go to jail when I’m treating patients. I can see why women would be afraid to seek care and to be honest about their situations so we can treat them as effectively as possible,” says the doctor, who has been practicing for more than 20 years. “Some women don’t know what the law is. It’s confusing.”

She stresses that since Georgia’s abortion ban was enacted, doctors feel like “we have our hands tied behind our backs.” And while she doesn’t understand why the hospital and doctor who treated Amber delayed urgent care for so long, she explains that after the law was enacted “we were uncertain and confused about how to interpret the law and how we could provide care.”

“We were scrambling to understand it.”

She says the abortion ban adds delays to the care of patients with complications, miscarriages, incomplete abortions, and other conditions which require consultations with hospital leadership, risk managers, and lawyers before proceeding.

“Sometimes it makes it difficult to practice medicine.” in Georgia admits the doctor who is a member of the Committee to Protect Health Care’s National Reproductive Freedom Task Force.

And sometimes she has to tell pregnant patients with serious health risks that they may have to leave the state to get an abortion.’

An Atlanta mom of three, 41, Candi Miller, didn’t leave the state when she accidentally got pregnant again. She suffered from debilitating lupus, diabetes and hypertension. To save her life, she ordered abortion pills online, but like Amber she tragically didn’t expel all he fetal tissue from her uterus.

When the excruciating pain set in from an infection she was too terrified by the state’s new abortion ban to see a doctor. She suffered for days taking strong painkillers until on November 12, her husband found her dead in her bed, next to her three year-old daughter.

An autopsy ruled that her death was caused by the combination of painkillers she consumed as she suffered.

Her son told ProPublica that the family believes she could have gotten “jail time “ if she was caught “trying to do anything to get rid of the baby.”

JD Vance just told a rally that the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wadewas a “victory” and that “the Republican Party is proud to be the ‘pro life’ and ‘pro family’ party."

Tell that to Amber and Candi’s children who lost their mothers.

When it takes two years to investigate the deaths of pregnant women, we should be prepared -- how many American women have already died?

Donald Trump asked his followers at a Long Island, New York rally on September 18, “What the hell do you have to lose?” if you vote for him.

If you’re a woman of reproductive age, the answer is clear: It could be your life.

Bonnie Fuller is a contributing writer to Courier Newsroom, Ms. magazine. and The Free Press covering politics and reproductive freedom. She is the former CEO of HollywoodLife.com and former editor-in-chief of US Weekly, Glamour, Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire and YM magazines. This is reprinted with permission from Your Body, Your Choice, her free Substack newsletter.

Donald Trump Can't Undo The Damage He Did To Abortion Rights

Donald Trump Can't Undo The Damage He Did To Abortion Rights

Try as he might, Donald Trump can't blur the hard reality he forced upon American women. He vowed in 2016 to get rid of Roe v. Wade and succeeded. As a result, American women lost a half-century right to end an unwanted or dangerous pregnancy.

Some of the harsh truths turn into nightmares. When Nicole Miller, mother of two and 20 weeks pregnant, started to bleed heavily, her husband rushed her to an emergency room in Boise, Idaho. She needed a life-saving abortion, but the ER staff refused to perform one. Instead, they loaded her onto a plane for Utah, where the doctors could do what she needed to survive.

One of the Idaho doctors reportedly told her, "We need to get you to a place where you have all of your options."

This story isn't a freakish exception. At least six women in similar situations have been airlifted out of Idaho, a scene you'd expect in an impoverished country with bare-bones health care.

Trump argues that ending Roe simply left rulemaking on abortion to the states. Some conservative states would have restrictive laws, he said. Some would be more relaxed. That pitch was not without its appeal.

Until you looked at the states. Idaho had put such a strict ban on abortion that its doctors wouldn't do the procedure for fear of losing their licenses and facing jail time if some ignoramus second-guessed their decision to end even a catastrophic pregnancy.

Miller recalls thinking, "I'm standing in front of doctors who know exactly what to do and how to help and they're refusing to do it."

After Roe went down, the Biden administration told ER doctors that they must perform emergency abortions when necessary to protect a pregnant woman's health. The U.S. Supreme Court — Trump's court — recently declined to decide on whether states had to comply with that federal law. Abortion foes claim that the ER exception was written to turn emergency rooms into "abortion havens." Oh, please.

There is now a nationwide migration of OB-GYNs from states that ban abortion to states that permit it. These specialists also deliver babies, and their departures are creating health care deserts for local women. Since its radical ban was put in place, Idaho has lost nearly a quarter of its doctors in obstetrics and gynecology and more than half its maternal fetal medicine specialists.

Trump tries to cover the damage he's done to women's health care with outlandish claims. The toxins in his brain recently formulated this assertion: "They will take the life of a child in the eighth month, the ninth month and even after birth."

Taking the life of a viable newborn is murder and was murder in the days of Roe. Trump doesn't say — and might not even know — that he was referring to the rare late-term abortions where the fetus has severe deformities and is nonviable.

Late-term abortions take place at or after 21 weeks of pregnancy, when something has gone terribly wrong. Fewer than one percent of abortions happen at that stage. Tests often don't reveal whether a fetus or the mother's health are in great danger until well into a pregnancy.

Trump is trying to appease his anti-abortion constituency while, wink-wink, struggling to make the pro-choice majority think his dismantling of Roe v. Wade isn't the disaster it's become.

Trump's "pro-life supporters" needn't worry. He has put them in charge. And he probably thinks he can lie his way out of the terrible consequences for women who need to end a pregnancy.

Who ever thought an American bleeding out from a disastrous pregnancy would have to be flown to safety in her own country?

Reprinted with permission from Creators.

Nancy Mace

Let's Watch The Making Of An 'Extrauterine Child'!

This week, the Alabama Supreme Court surprised absolutely no one with a ruling that frozen embryos created through the process of in vitro fertilization are children. Somewhere in its blizzard of references to Biblical verses, Christian theologians, even something called “The Manhattan Declaration,” the court essentially confirmed the long-time anti-abortion ideology that life begins at conception and no matter the method of conception, even a flash-frozen fertilized egg is alive. The Alabama Supreme Court found that frozen embryos are protected under the state’s wrongful death statutes. The decision even went to the trouble of coining a word for these new living beings: extrauterine children.

The Alabama decision has caused several of the state’s in vitro fertilization (IVF) clinics to close their doors for fear that if a frozen embryo is destroyed, discarded or even lost during the IVF procedure, it would leave the doctors and the clinics and even the patients vulnerable to prosecution for killing extrauterine children.

People like husbands, lovers, parents, even older children of pregnant women attend the live births of children all the time, so, if Alabama is now saying that any embryo is a child, whether fresh, frozen, or in the process of being used in an IVF, why don’t we attend the medical procedure that amounts to the creation of one of these brand new microscopic children!

The process begins with a woman, although not necessarily the woman who, if the IVF is successful, will actually give birth to a living, breathing child. In vitro fertilization involves what is euphemistically called harvesting a woman’s eggs. It begins with the production of a woman’s eggs being chemically encouraged using something called “ovarian hyperstimulation.” Adequately stimulating the ovaries isn’t enough, however. In order to be able to retrieve eggs, the time of ovulation must be predictable, and that’s where the “trigger shot” comes in. Once the ovarian follicles are developed enough, a shot of hormones is administered, setting the ovulation schedule for 38 to 40 hours after the shot.

Now comes the time for harvesting the eggs via “transvaginal oocyte retrieval.” The woman, who throughout the process is referred to as “the patient,” is taken to an operating room and usually put under general anesthesia so that a fine needle guided by transvaginal ultrasound can be inserted through the vaginal wall into her ovarian follicles, from which multiple eggs, usually somewhere between 10 and 30, are aspirated. The eggs come out in a solution of follicular fluid and are quickly removed to another room where they are cleansed of cumulus cells and prepared for fertilization.

Meanwhile, a man’s sperm has been similarly prepared in a process called “sperm washing,” which removes seminal fluid and inactive, or dead, sperm cells.

Any eggs or sperm that are not to be used can at this point be separately frozen. It should be noted that either of these two necessary elements in the creation of life that are not chosen to be used can be destroyed. That’s okay with the state of Alabama, because it takes the next step for them to become “extrauterine children.”

Now the eggs and the sperm are introduced in a liquid medium, the proverbial “test tube” or “petri dish,” although neither is actually used in the process. In certain cases involving low sperm count, a single sperm can be injected into a single egg by intracytoplasmic injection. This is done under a microscope.

Once the eggs are fertilized, they are put into a so-called growth medium and allowed to grow for two to four days, through the cleavage stage, when the embryo splits into two cells, to the blastocyst stage of six to eight cells.

Get this: At this point, the embryos are “graded,” to determine the quality of the embryo and its likelihood of resulting in a live birth. By removing one or two cells from the blastocyst stage, embryos can be genetically analyzed for birth defects or inherited diseases, and depending on who’s doing the grading and what the criteria are, one or more of the embryos can be chosen over the others. An embryo at this point can even be chosen to provide embryonic cells that can be used to cure a sick child the woman has previously given birth to.

Now the embryo, or more often, embryos, can be inserted into the woman’s uterus through a thin catheter. If one or more of the implanted embryos attaches to the wall of the uterus and grows into a fetus, they can become actual, live, breathing children.

Or they can be frozen and become extrauterine children.

Amazing, isn’t it? The Alabama Supreme Court decision was made by nine Republican justices because there are no justices appointed by Democratic governors and confirmed by the state Senate. The vote was 8 to 1. Alabama is one of the states that has a law declaring that life begins at conception, the holy grail of the anti-abortion movement.

There are two other states with laws declaring that life begins at conception: Missouri and Mississippi. Legislatures in at least 14 more states have introduced so-called fetal personhood bills this year alone. But when the IVF clinics in Alabama began to shut down on Wednesday and the shutdowns continued yesterday and today, all of a sudden it occurred to the geniuses in the Republican Party who have been pushing for religion to be a determining factor in our government and laws, and for laws to be passed declaring that life begins at conception, that maybe this whole blastocyst-is-a-kid thing isn’t such a good idea.

Suddenly it occurred to Republicans that all those couples out there who have problems having children, or single women who want to give birth via IVF, won’t be able to do it because the process by its very nature involves the destruction of some of what Alabama called extrauterine children.

Republican presidential candidate Niki Haley, whose initial response to the Alabama ruling was, “Embryos, to me, are babies,” was described as “walking back” her comment.

South Carolina Congresswoman Nancy Mace, who is a sponsor of the federal Life at Conception Act, which would write into law that life begins when an egg is fertilized, was on Twitter-X today saying, “We should do everything we can to protect IVF for women everywhere.”

There is going to be a lot of Republican shifting into reverse in the coming days and months. When you mix politics and religion, bad things can happen. And when you take away the rights of more than 50 percent of the population to make their own healthcare decisions and turn those decisions over to a bunch of state legislatures and governors and state courts, worse things happen.

One of the major reasons that the anti-abortion movement has been squeamish about IVF for decades is that fundamentalist Christians don’t like the idea of messing around with nature, which introducing needles and drugs and operating rooms and all that medical gear certainly amounts to.

They are not squeamish about telling women what to do with their bodies, however. The result that is emerging from this political shitstorm is that Republicans are fine with prodding and poking and injecting and inserting things into women’s uteruses so long as it results in the birth of a baby, or as the Alabama Supreme Court has proven, the creation of an extrauterine child.

But prod her and poke her and give her shots and insert things in her uterus because she doesn’t want a child? That’s a no-no.

There is an essential contradiction Republicans have constructed: if you’re pregnant and don’t want to have the baby, you can’t stop your pregnancy. But if you’re infertile and you want to start a pregnancy, you can’t do that, either. Either way, if you are a woman, you are not in control of your own body. Laws, and court decisions written by Republicans are.

Despite their attempts to back and fill and shift into reverse and obfuscate and tell outright lies to solve this contradiction, it is about to come home for Republicans at the ballot box.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Please consider subscribing to Lucian Truscott Newsletter, from which this is reprinted with permission.

President Joe Biden

Biden Marks Roe Anniversary With New Abortion Protections (And A Stinging Ad)

President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris are commemorating the 51st anniversary of Roe v. Wade, kicking off what will be a year-long campaign to put abortion and reproductive health rights at the forefront in 2024. That includes the White House announcing new steps to strengthen protections and access to contraception, abortion medication, and emergency abortions at hospitals, facing Donald Trump and his packed Supreme Court head on.

It also includes blasting out this 60-second ad featuring Dr. Austin Dennard, an OB/GYN and a mother of three, who fled the state to get an abortion. The fetus she was carrying had a fatal deformity and carrying it potentially threatened her life.

“In Texas, you are forced to carry that pregnancy, and that is because of Donald Trump overturning Roe v. Wade,” Dennard says in the ad. “The choice was completely taken away. I was to continue my pregnancy, putting my life at risk,” she continued. “It’s every woman’s worst nightmare, and it was absolutely unbearable.”

Biden’s statement on the anniversary of Roe makes the stakes of this election clear: Abortion opponents want women in every state to be subjected to what Dennard faced. “Even as Americans—from Ohio to Kentucky to Michigan to Kansas to California—have resoundingly rejected attempts to limit reproductive freedom, Republican elected officials continue to push for a national ban and devastating new restrictions across the country.”

It also puts forced birth advocates on the spot. They want a national abortion ban, but they know that saying that out loud is a political suicide. Even at Friday’s March for Life, prominent lawmakers and activists steered clear from talking about abortion bans, or even from taking a victory lap at having finally succeeded in overturning Roe. Instead, many talked about efforts to divert federal funding to anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers, trying to put a caring face on forcing people to carry unwanted, often dangerous, pregnancies.

“This is a critical time to help all moms who are facing unplanned pregnancies,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said at the rally. “To work with foster children and help families who are adopting, to volunteer and assist at our vital pregnancy resource center and maternity homes, and to reach out a renewed hand of compassion and to speak truth and love.” Right, it’s all about compassion and love with the GOP.

Biden and Harris aren’t going to let Republicans get away with that, rhetorically or in terms of policy. The measures the White House unveiled expanded access to contraception, guaranteed access to the abortion pill, and a new task force dedicated to enforcing the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, which requires hospitals to provide “stabilizing” health care for patients in emergency situations, including labor. That care, the Biden administration maintains, includes abortion.

That puts the administration at loggerheads with the Trump-packed Supreme Court, which will hear a proposed law from the state of Idaho prosecuting emergency room doctors who provide abortions in the course of stabilizing patients. The Justice Department is preparing to argue the law at the Supreme Court later this year.

Biden is also taking the court on by announcing he is “directing further efforts to support patients, providers, and pharmacies who wish to legally access, prescribe, or provide medication abortion.” The court will decide on restrictions on that access—even in states where abortion remains legal—later this year.

Meanwhile, Harris is kicking off her “Reproductive Freedoms Tour” of swing states starting Monday in Wisconsin. She’s taking the fight to Trump in a speech previewed by Politico: “He made a decision to take your freedoms, and it is a decision he does not regret. Just two weeks ago, he said, that for years, ‘they were trying to get Roe v. Wade terminated.’ And then he bragged, ‘I did it, and I’m proud to have done it.’”

“He is proud,” Harris continues. “Proud that women across our nation are suffering? Proud that women have been robbed of a fundamental freedom? That doctors could be thrown in prison for caring for patients? That young women today have fewer rights than their mothers and grandmothers?”

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

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