 "US VP debate: Who was Amber Thurman, the 28-year-old who died after incomplete abortion?")
US Vice presidential candidates Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Ohio Senator JD Vance squared off for the first and only time this election season in New York City Tuesday evening.
Unlike the last two presidential debates, the candidates appeared to be more cordial during the CBS News Vice Presidential debate.
Despite their divergent political views, the two found common ground on a topic related to abortion, which is an important issue in this election.
On the matter, the Democratic nominee Walz brought up the example of Amber Thurman, who died due to the state’s “restrictive” abortion laws after Roe v Wade was overturned.
Who was Amber Thurman?
Georgia resident Amber Nicole Thurman, 28, died in 2022 after being denied immediate medical care due to the state’s restrictive abortion laws.
The prospective nursing student had just established a new degree of stability for herself and her young son when she discovered that she was pregnant with twins.
She drove to North Carolina with a close friend because her pregnancy had already grown above the gestational limit in her state, and there, a clinic gave her abortion drugs.
Although unusual issues can arise, complications from abortion pills are very rare.
Thurman’s uterus had retained some pregnant tissue, which is why she suffered bleeding, pain, and a drop in blood pressure when she arrived at the Georgia emergency room. These symptoms are indicative of an infection.
Thurman might have been saved by dilation and curettage (D&C), an abortion technique in which the cervix is opened to allow for the insertion of instruments to remove the uterus’s contents.
Although common, it is also a standard component of gynaecological care and miscarriage treatments.
A D&C takes around 15 minutes and doesn’t require any special equipment, so Thurman probably would have recovered if the tissue had been removed right after.
But the state of Georgia banned abortion, making it illegal to carry out the practice outside of situations involving the management of a “spontaneous” or “naturally occurring” miscarriage.
It was against the law to treat Thurman’s miscarriage because she had taken abortion pills.
She spent twenty hours in a hospital bed when she became septic and started to have organ failure.
It was already too late when the Georgia doctors agreed to treat her.
The research that ProPublica published last month was the first to make Thurman’s case public.
It is the first known fatality in Georgia that has been connected to postponed abortion care.
The news organisation also reported on the death of Candi Miller, a woman with lupus, diabetes and hypertension who took abortion pills she ordered online. An autopsy found foetal tissue that hadn’t been expelled and a lethal combination of painkillers, ProPublica reported. The state’s maternal mortality review committee did not believe abortion medication caused her death. Still, the fact is both women used the pills — mifepristone and misoprostol.
It is also pertinent to mention here that Thurman’s passing happened just two weeks after the Supreme Court decided to reverse Roe v. Wade, which led to Georgia enacting an abortion restriction.
Georgia’s heartbeat law states that “no abortion shall be performed if the unborn child has a detectable human heartbeat except in the event of a medical emergency or medically futile pregnancy.”
Although the six-week ban allows abortions in early pregnancy to save a mother’s life, critics say the law has created dangerous confusion for doctors about when they’re allowed to provide care.
What happened at the VP debate?
Walz pounced on Vance repeatedly over abortion access and reproductive rights as the Ohio senator tried to argue that a state-by-state matrix of abortion laws is the ideal approach for the United States.
Walz countered that a “basic right” for a woman should not be determined “by geography.”
“This is a very simple proposition: These are women’s decisions,” Walz said. “We trust women. We trust doctors.”
Walz sought to personalise the issue by referencing the death of Amber Thurman.
“There’s a young woman named Amber Thurman. She happened to be in Georgia, a restrictive state. Because of that, she had to travel a long distance to North Carolina to try and get her care. Amber Thurman died in that journey back and forth. The fact of the matter is, how can we as a nation say that your life and your rights, as basic as the right to control your own body, is determined on geography,” Walz said while sparring with Vance on abortion laws.
“There’s a very real chance that if Amber Thurman lived in Minnesota, she would be alive today. That’s why the restoration of Roe v. Wade,” he said.
Rather than sidestep the reference, Vance at one point agreed with Walz that “Amber Thurman should still be alive.”
Vance said that doctors are free to refuse to provide life-saving care to newborns who survive poorly performed late-term abortions under a Minnesota statute that Walz approved.
But Walz refuted this assertion, describing it as untrue. Vance’s claim misrepresents a bill Walz signed into law in 2023, updating language about the care of newborns.
The new language uses the phrase “an infant who is born alive” instead of “a born alive infant as a result of an abortion.” It states that medical personnel are required to “care for the infant who is born alive” rather than “preserve the life and health of the born alive infant.”
Both the current version of the law and the 2015 version that was amended state that “an infant who is born alive shall be fully recognised as a human person, and accorded immediate protection under the law.”
Infanticide is criminalised in every state, including Minnesota, and the bill does not change that.
A rallying cry for Democrats?
Democratic lawmakers, including Vice President Kamala Harris, have seized upon her passing as a call to action, claiming that the state’s abortion ban has prevented needless deaths.
Last month, Harris blasted Donald Trump as a threat to women’s freedoms and their very lives. Such deaths, Harris said, were not only preventable but predictable because of laws that have been implemented since the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.
“Good policy, logical policy, moral policy, humane policy is about saying a healthcare provider will only start providing that care when you’re about to die?” Harris asked.
Dozens of pregnant patients have faced delayed care or been turned away from hospitals amid medical emergencies over the last two years, a violation of federal law, since Roe v. Wade was overturned by the US Supreme Court.
Violations occurred in states with and without abortion bans. But an AP analysis earlier this year found an immediate spike in some states with abortion bans, including Texas, following the ruling.
Trump has repeatedly said he was proud to help overturn Roe v. Wade by appointing conservative justices during his term in office. He’s also said he supports exceptions to abortion bans in cases of rape, incest or the life of the mother.
Karoline Leavitt, a spokesperson for Trump’s campaign, said that since Georgia has such exceptions in place, “it’s unclear why doctors did not swiftly act to protect the lives of mothers.”
With inputs from agencies
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