Last month, ProPublica published two stories of women who died from abortion bans after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022 via the Dobbs decision. While it wasn’t the first story to surface in the media about such a tragedy — the New Yorker published a similar account in January this year — it was the first time these deaths were deemed “preventable” by a state committee of experts in maternal health.
In the first story, a woman named Amber Nicole Thurman, a 28-year-old mother, died less than a month after Georgia passed its abortion law after waiting 20 hours to get treatment for a rare complication from taking an abortion pill. A 10-member committee set up to examine maternal mortality cases deemed she would have likely lived if doctors had used the protocols that had been in place before the Georgia law made them a felony.
