Vice President Kamala Harris is blaming the deaths of two Georgia women at the feet of Donald Trump, conservative Supreme Court justices, and Republican lawmakers after ProPublica reported that one was denied emergency medical care and the other was afraid to seek help because of a criminal law prohibiting abortions after about six weeks of pregnancy.
The Democratic presidential nominee addressed the case of a Georgia woman who died after not receiving timely medical care for complications from an abortion at a rally in Atlanta on Friday afternoon.
Harris said Trump’s appointment of three conservative Supreme Court justices allowed puritanical religious zealots to overturn Roe v. Wade and allow barbaric lawmakers to pass laws resulting in the deaths of two women in the state.
She delivered a broad onslaught against Trump and his Republican allies, criticizing them over in vitro fertilization, contraception and a failure to protect maternal health.
“This is a health-care crisis. And Donald Trump is the architect of this crisis,” said Harris, during her most comprehensive speech on abortion since starting her presidential campaign two months ago. “He brags about overturning Roe v. Wade — in his own words, quote, ‘I did it and I’m proud to have done it.’ He says he is proud. Proud that women are dying, proud that doctors and nurses could be thrown in prison for administering care and proud that young women today have fewer rights than their mothers and grandmothers?”
“These hypocrites want to start talking about this is in the best interest of women and children,” she said. “Well, where you been? Where you been when it comes to taking care of the women and children of America? Where you been? How dare they? How dare they?”
“Now we know that at least two women — and those are only the stories we know here in the state of Georgia — died because of a Trump abortion ban,” Harris said. “The reality is, for every story we hear of the suffering under Trump abortion bans, there are so many of the stories we’re not hearing, but where suffering is happening every day in our country.”
Her Friday visit came after two ProPublica articles reported that two Georgia women — Amber Nicole Thurman and Candi Miller — died after not receiving timely abortion and medical care.
Harris focused on the story of Thurman, who died after spending 20 hours in a hospital bed. She was waiting for doctors to begin an operation to remove fetal tissue that her body had not expelled after she took an abortion pill.
In her final hours, Thurman suffered from a grave infection that her suburban Atlanta hospital was well-equipped to treat.
She’d taken abortion pills and encountered a rare complication; she had not expelled all of the fetal tissue from her body. She showed up at Piedmont Henry Hospital in need of a routine procedure to clear it from her uterus, called a dilation and curettage, or D&C.
But just that summer, her state had made performing the procedure a felony, with few exceptions. Any doctor who violated the new Georgia law could be prosecuted and face up to a decade in prison.
Thurman waited in pain in a hospital bed, worried about what would happen to her 6-year-old son, as doctors monitored her infection spreading, her blood pressure sinking and her organs beginning to fail.
It took 20 hours for doctors to finally operate. By then, it was too late, accoording to Kavitha Surana, a reporter who has been covering reproductive health care access since Roe v. Wade was overturned.
The otherwise healthy 28-year-old medical assistant, who had her sights set on nursing school, should not have died, an official state committee recently concluded.
Tasked with examining pregnancy-related deaths to improve maternal health, the experts, including 10 doctors, deemed hers “preventable” and said the hospital’s delay in performing the critical procedure had a “large” impact on her fatal outcome.
The issue of abortion has been a salient one for Democrats, and Harris is aiming to build on the momentum her party has built, chiefly by blaming Trump for the fallout from the Supreme Court’s decision.
Over the past two years, every ballot measure that has sought to preserve or expand abortion access has been successful, while those that have sought to restrict abortion access have failed — even in states that skew conservative.