national news & analysis

GA Dems lament the limits of abortion exceptions after preventable deaths

By Michael Jones

Medication abortion—the most common form of the procedure to end a pregnancy—is safer than surgery to remove your wisdom teeth and low-risk prescription drugs, including penicillin, Viagra, and Tylenol. But since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022 and more than one in five states enacted an abortion ban, women have encountered physical and emotional suffering due to restrictions on care.

And this week, we have evidence that women have lost their lives, despite arguments from congressional Republicans and anti-abortion activists that exceptions for rape, incest, and the life of the mother are substantial guardrails against fatal outcomes.

ProPublica recently published two reports highlighting preventable deaths in 2022 related to Georgia’s strict abortion ban. 

The first story involved a 28-year-old Georgia woman who died due to septic shock after a hospital waited too long to perform a dilation and curettage, a routine medical procedure to remove tissue from inside a pregnant person’s uterus after a miscarriage or abortion. Georgia’s abortion ban reclassified D&Cs as felony crimes.

The subject of the second article was a 41-year-old woman who died from a deadly mix of painkillers in her system after she performed a self-managed abortion at home but decided against seeking medical attention throughout her pregnancy due to fear of jail time under Georgia’s abortion ban.

A state maternal mortality review committee concluded that both deaths were preventable.

Nikema Williams, a House Democrat representing most parts of Atlanta, told me this week that these deaths connect to a broader reproductive health care crisis.

“These are the consequences that we’re living with in the aftermath [of Dobbs], when we’re already seeing so many black women dying within one year of childbirth. Our maternal mortality rates are awful. Half of our counties in Georgia don’t even have an OBGYN—over half, no OBGYN,” she said. “And so then when we’re overwhelming those providers that already exist and having women having to travel out of state to get care and not being able to get the follow-up care that they need is unconscionable.”

Rep. Lucy McBath (D-GA) said the toll is devastating on medical providers who’ve taken a Hippocratic oath to protect and care for people and to save their patients’ lives. Due to many of these statewide bans, they are unsure of their legal liability.

“It’s all sorely needed health care. It doesn’t matter what side of the fence a woman sits on. It doesn’t matter her demographic standing. It doesn’t matter her political standing,” McBath said. “This is all about creating an environment where women have a broad range of health care for any circumstances—and not even just for exceptions for her life or exceptions for the life of the child. It’s all access to the best quality of health care. Every woman deserves that.”

The Georgia abortion ban went into effect almost a month after the Dobbs decision in 2022. The state Supreme Court reinstated the ban that November after a lower court overturned the law. It upheld the ban and sent a challenge back to Fulton County Superior Court last October.

In the wake of Dobbs, the US maternal and infant mortality rate rose in 2022 for the first time in 20 years with more than 30 states seeing at least slight increases. Georgia was one of four states—including Iowa, Missouri, and Texas—that had statistically significant increases. All four states also have some of the most restrictive abortion bans in the nation.

On the same day the first ProPublica story broke, Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA) held a Senate Judiciary Human Rights Subcommittee hearing on how the Georgia abortion ban is forcing women to continue high-risk and nonviable pregnancies.

“It is critically important that the public hear directly from health care providers and from women who have been denied basic health care in the state of Georgia as a result of our state’s abortion ban,” Ossoff said during his closing statement. “These brave women are not alone.”

Georgia OB-GYNs testified in July before the subcommittee, which Ossoff currently chairs, to warn lawmakers that the state’s abortion ban is risking the lives of pregnant women because women are being denied care during miscarriages and have gone into sepsis in part due to doctors fearing prosecution for providing care.

Ossoff was one of 49 Senate Democrats who supported a procedural vote to advance a bill that would enshrine nationwide protections for IVF to a debate as the future of fertility treatments is uncertain after the fall of Roe. All but two voting Republicans voted against it. (Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, Trump’s running mate, skipped the vote.)

Vice President Kamala Harris, who assumed the role of the Biden administration’s face of the post-Dobbs response, called the death of the first woman ProPublica revealed a “tragic story” during a conversation hosted by the National Association of Black Journalists in Philadelphia this week. In a separate statement from her campaign, she said the woman should be alive, raising her son, and pursuing her dream of attending nursing school.

“In more than 20 states, Trump Abortion Bans are preventing doctors from providing basic medical care. Women are bleeding out in parking lots, turned away from emergency rooms, losing their ability to ever have children again,” she said in a separate statement from the campaign. “Survivors of rape and incest are being told they cannot make decisions about what happens next to their bodies. And now women are dying. These are the consequences of Donald Trump’s actions.”

Harris will travel to the Atlanta area tomorrow to speak about reproductive freedom and how the Dobbs decision enabled abortion bans across the country, including states like Georgia. The campaign calls the visit an opportunity to show up and use her voice to rally with Americans in another moment of national interest on an urgent issue Americans care about, similar to her engagement in gun violence prevention and preserving American democracy.

The visit comes as the campaign focuses on contrasting Harris’s and Trump’s records and visions on reproductive freedom.

The campaign launched an ad this week featuring Hadley Duvall—a Kentucky woman who became pregnant after her stepfather raped her at age 12 after several years of sexual abuse who posted about her experience on Facebook following the Dobbs decision—that described how girls in similar situations as Duvall have fewer options than she did due to statewide abortion bans. (The ad is soundtracked to Billie Eilish’s song “When the Party’s Over; Eilish and her brother Finneas endorsed the vice president on Tuesday.)

The Harris campaign launched a 50-stop reproductive freedom bus tour last month across red and blue communities in battleground states to warn voters before Election Day of the threat Democrats believe Trump poses to Americans’ rights to make decisions about their reproductive health.

The vice president’s travel and her campaign’s focus on women and families who abortion bans have impacted is a welcome departure from the pre-Dobbs era when women who sounded the alarm on what a world without Roe would look like were mostly ignored, especially if they were Black, brown, poor, disabled, or queer.

This includes implicit bias among maternal healthcare professionals, which contributes to racial and ethnic disparities in patient outcomes.

“I think about my own self,” Williams told me. “With great insurance, advocating for my own rights, and my blood pressure spiked the day that I was being discharged from the hospital—they’re about to send me home, band already clipped from my wrist and I was readmitted to the hospital when my baby had been discharged. But I could have died in that situation had I not demanded that my blood pressure be rechecked and they saw how high it was before they sent me home.”

McBath added that women of color lend credibility to discourse because they suffer the social determinants she referred to earlier that adversely affect them the most.

“Listen to us because we’re experiencing this every single day of our lives—even highly educated women, women of means, and they’re still suffering in the same vein,” McBath said. “It’s important to pay attention to all the symptoms that we have. It’s important to make sure that we have access to those provisions and needs, but also we have access to be able to make decisions that we need to make about our bodies with our loved one, our health care providers and our God.”


Michael Jones is an independent Capitol Hill correspondent and contributor for COURIER. He is the author of Once Upon a Hill, a newsletter about Congressional politics.

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