The First Wave of Post-Roe Deaths Has Already Arrived

This week has been a grim one for the future of abortion and reproductive-care rights in the United States. Not only did Senate Republicans block a Democratic bill to provide a nationwide right to in vitro fertilization treatments on Tuesday, but on Monday, the nonprofit newsroom ProPublica published the posthumous medical records of a 28-year-old Georgia woman named Amber Nicole Thurman who died in 2022 after her state’s restrictive abortion laws prevented her doctors from performing a dilation and curettage (or D&C ) that could have saved her life. Thurman had ended up in the hospital due to a rare complication from taking abortion pills.

“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,” ProPublica’s report reads. “It took 20 hours for doctors to finally operate. By then, it was too late.



” Vice president and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris has already linked Thurman’s death to what she refers to as “Trump abortion bans” : While Roe v. Wade fell during Biden’s administration, the Supreme Court justices who voted to overturn the nearly 50-year-old decision were largely appointed by former president Donald Trump. One of the most chilling parts of Thurman’s story is the fact that she is likely not the first pregnant person to die as a result of Roe ’s overturn.

ProPublica is set to share another, similar case in the coming days—and for every victim of anti-choice policy whose name and story we know, there are likely dozens we don’t. Hopefully, the Harris-Walz campaign ’s attempts to draw attention to Trump and other GOP leaders’ failures to defend reproductive autonomy can enact change on a national level—but until November, the best thing we can do may be to support local abortion funds..