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The mother of a woman who died after waiting 20 hours for emergency medical care for an infection caused by an abortion pill complication shared her daughter’s heartbreaking final moments at a Thursday evening rally for Vice President Kamala Harris in Michigan.
“Initially I did not want the public to know my pain,” Amber Nicole Thurman’s mother, Shanette Williams, told the audience at the Unite America rally, where Harris was joined by Oprah Winfrey. “I wanted to go through it in silence, but I realized that it was selfish.
Thurman, a 28-year-old medical assistant, died two years ago after doctors at Piedmont Henry Hospital in the Atlanta suburbs waited 20 hours before performing a procedure called dilation and curettage to treat a rare complication she’d suffered after taking abortion medication. She’d arrived at the hospital after vomiting blood and passing out, ProPublica reports, and doctors had quickly determined that her uterus had not expelled all of the fetal tissue in her body.
Thurman died on the operating table, with a state committee comprised of 10 doctors later calling her death “preventable.”
Her death came as doctors were grappling with Georgia’s new abortion laws, which made the dilation and curettage procedure a felony offense in most cases.
This week, Harris blamed the tragedy on “Trump’s abortion bans,” insisting they are “preventing doctors from providing basic medical care.” During his White House tenure, Donald Trump appointed three conservative Supreme Court justices — all of whom voted for the overturning of Roe v Wade, which guaranteed abortion access.
“This young mother should be alive, raising her son, and pursuing her dream of attending nursing school,” Harris said in a statement. “This is exactly what we feared when Roe was struck down. In more than 20 states, Trump Abortion Bans are preventing doctors from providing basic medical care.”
On Thursday, Williams told the crowd that she wanted them to know “Amber was not a statistic.”
“She was loved by a family, a strong family, and we would’ve done whatever to get my baby, our baby, the help that she needed,” she added.
Describing herself as “broken,” Williams told the audience that she experienced “the worst pain ever that a mother, that a parent, could ever feel.”
ProPublica had previously reported that as Thurman lay in her hospital bed, urgently awaiting treatment, her blood pressure sank, and organs began to fail. When doctors finally performed the operation, some 20 hours after she’d arrived at the hospital, Thurman pleaded to her mother: “Promise me you’ll take care of my son.”
Williams had no idea that her daughter had been pregnant, the publication said.
The Independent has contacted Georgia Maternal Mortality in the Georgia Department of Public Health and Piedmont Henry Hospital for comment.
