Kamala Harris‘ campaign is highlighting the preventable deaths of two women who would be alive if not for Georgia’s abortion ban. This week reporting from ProPublica proved out the warning that abortion bans could be deadly, by bringing forward the names and faces of two Georgia women, Amber Thurman and Candi Miller, who died in 2022 but would be alive today if not for the state’s ban.
“Amber’s mom shared with me that the word over and over again in her mind is ‘preventable,’” Harris said Thursday evening at a Michigan campaign forum hosted by Oprah Winfrey. Thurman’s mother and two sisters were in the audience. “This story is a story that is sadly not the only story of what has been happening since these bans have taken place.”
“There is a word: preventable. And there is another word: predictable.”
Amber Thurman and Candi Miller both died after medication-induced abortions failed to expel all the fetal tissue, resulting in fatal infections, ProPublica reported. They were among the first women to die from what could be called a modern back-alley abortion: abortions that have been pushed underground and exiled from the safety of expert medical supervision.
In the days since ProPublica broke the news of these preventable deaths, anti-abortion activists have sought to blame the women. “Abortion killed Amber Thurman,” anti-abortion activist Lila Rose posted on X, shifting blame from the ban to the procedure and, implicitly, Thurman herself. The stories are complicated for advocates fighting to keep abortion medication on the market, as their stories highlight the rare times in which medication abortions require emergency follow-up care. (Such episodes are at the center of a current lawsuit to take one of the drugs, mifepristone, off the market.) But from the beginning to the end of their tragic stories, it’s clear that both women died for one reason: Georgia’s strict abortion ban.
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Pema Levy is a reporter at Mother Jones
