Amber Thurman died after the abortion pills she took at nine weeks into her pregnancy failed to produce a complete abortion.
Thurman became septic but doctors at the Georgia hospital she visited chose not to intervene quickly and perform the dilation and curettage (D&C) procedure she needed to remove the infected remains/tissue and save her life.
Candi Miller reportedly ordered abortion pills online because she feared that her pregnancy could be dangerous, due to her pre-existing health conditions.
Those abortion pills failed to completely terminate her pregnancy, and it appears that Miller also became septic with parts of the fetus left inside of her.
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.
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.