Her daughter died, so Shanette Williams is fighting to restore the right to abortion

The weight of grief is a heavy thing, but Shanette Williams does not carry it alone.

In her hands, she holds the obituary of her daughter, Amber Nicole Thurman—a 28-year-old woman whose life was cut short by a medical system that hesitated when it should have acted, that delayed when it should have saved.

Williams, a woman of quiet strength and unwavering faith, speaks with a voice that trembles not with fear, but with resolve. “I can’t just lay in my bedroom and shut myself away from it. I have to fight. I have to. This is my charge,” she says.

Two years ago, in the suffocating wake of the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade, Amber Thurman died in a Georgia hospital after complications from a medication abortion. Her death, according to state medical officials, was entirely preventable.

Had doctors performed a simple 15-minute procedure—a dilation and curettage (D&C)—when she first arrived at Piedmont Henry Hospital, Amber might still be here. Instead, she endured 20 hours of agony before her heart gave out on the operating table.

“I said, ‘I’ll be waiting on you,’” Williams recalls, her voice breaking. “It was almost like… did she know?”

Amber was a mother, a medical assistant with dreams of nursing school, a woman who loved candles from Bath & Body Works and whose 6-year-old son, Messiah, was her reason for living. “She told me, ‘You’re going to have to take care of Messiah,’” Williams says. “I told her she’d be fine. But she wasn’t.”

The tragedy of Amber’s death is not just a story of medical failure—it is a story of systemic failure. In the months after the fall of Roe, Georgia’s six-week abortion ban took effect, sowing confusion and fear among doctors.

Kwajelyn Jackson, executive director of Atlanta’s Feminist Women’s Health Center, says the hospital’s inaction was indefensible. “The only explanation,” she says, “is that as a Black woman, they were not willing to take any additional risk to save her life.”

The data bears this out. Black women in Georgia are 3.3 times more likely to die from pregnancy-related complications than white women. Nationally, Black maternal mortality rates are more than triple those of white women. These are not just statistics—they are lives, like Amber’s, lost to indifference and institutional neglect.

Yet Williams refuses to let her daughter’s death be in vain. She has become a fierce advocate for restoring federal abortion protections, joining a chorus of women whose stories expose the brutal consequences of restrictive laws. “They let my baby sit down and pass,” says Andre Thurman, Amber’s father. “More has to be done.”

In September 2024, civil rights attorney Ben Crump took up the family’s case, calling Amber’s death “a horrifying consequence of draconian abortion laws.”

Georgia officials, scrambling in the wake of national outcry, issued a memo clarifying that abortions are permitted in medical emergencies—a reassurance that comes too late for Amber.

For Williams, no legal victory can bring her daughter back. But she will not stop speaking, not stop fighting, not stop holding that obituary in her hands as a testament to what was lost—and what must be reclaimed.

“I feel her saying, ‘I’m proud of you,’” Williams says. “And that’s why I’ll keep going.”

Because in the end, this is not just about laws. It is about justice. It is about memory. It is about a mother’s love—and the unshakable belief that no other family should suffer as hers has.

The fight continues.