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GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the conspiracy-peddling congresswoman from Georgia, slammed Vice President Kamala Harris as a liar for linking a woman’s death to the state’s current abortion rules that all but outlaw the abortion.
“Kamala Harris is lying to women in GA right now!” Greene posted to X as Harris spoke to supporters in Atlanta last Friday. “She claims Amber Nicole Thurman died from an abortion ‘ban’ in GA. The TRUTH is Amber tragically died from taking abortion pills! And there is NO Trump abortion ‘ban.’ The Supreme Court gave states the right to make their own decisions.”
When the Trump-aligned conservative-majority Supreme Court in June 2022 overturned the federal law guaranteeing a woman’s right to an abortion, the decision-making power was given to individual states. Today, nearly one-third of US states have in place near-total abortion bans, with Georgia among the most severe. Last Friday, Harris pointed out to the Atlanta crowd that doctors in the Peachtree State face up to a decade in prison for providing abortion care outside of an extremely narrow set of exceptions.
Greene was referring to one of at least two Georgia women who died after receiving delayed abortion-related medical care, as nonprofit investigative news outlet ProPublica reported September 16. Four days after the report came out, Harris, while addressing attendees at the Cobb Energy Performing Arts Center, brought up Thurman in order to highlight the very real dangers of the post-Roe v. Wade era.
“She was going to nursing school, raising her six-year-old son,” Harris said of the late 28-year-old. “... She had her plan, what she wanted to do for her son, for herself, for their future. And so, when she discovered that she was pregnant, she decided she wanted to have an abortion, but because of the Trump abortion ban here in Georgia, she was forced to travel out of state to receive the health care that she needed.”
In July 2022, the month after Roe was overturned, Thurman discovered she was pregnant. However, she had just passed the six-week mark, the point at which Georgia now bans abortions, according to ProPublica. So Thurman went to North Carolina, where the procedure at that stage remained legal, but her appointment at the clinic was given away when she was late due to traffic. Instead, the outlet reported, a clinic staffer gave Thurman two “abortion pills” to take upon her return home to Georgia, which would induce a miscarriage. But when Thurman’s body failed to clear all of the fetal tissue, she went to a local hospital to have it removed via dilation and curettage, a routine procedure known as a “D&C.”
Performing a D&C in Georgia — with only the strictest of exceptions, such as to save the life of the mother — is now constituted a felony in Georgia. Thurman ultimately waited 20 hours before doctors took her into surgery, and her heart stopped on the operating table, according to ProPublica.
“Amber waited 20 hours — 20 hours, excruciating hours — until finally she was in enough physical distress that her doctors thought they would be okay to treat her,” Harris said in Atlanta. “But it was too late. She died of sepsis. And her last words to her mother — which her mother, as you know, tears up and cries every time she speaks it — last words to her mother, ‘Promise me you’ll take care of my son.’”
Thurman’s death was “preventable,” a state committee concluded, which was echoed by Harris last week.
“Amber’s mother, Shanette, told me that the word ‘preventable’ is over and over again in her head when she learned about how her child died — the word ‘preventable,’” Harris said. “She cannot — she can’t stop thinking about the word that they spoke to her. It was ‘preventable.’”
A spokesman for Greene did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Monday.
