Amber Nicole Thurman and Candi Miller, two Black women who died after trying home abortions, aren’t the only ones who have suffered due to Georgia’s abortion restriction law, according to Monica Simpson, executive director of SisterSong, an Atlanta-based reproductive justice group.
“There are so many other people … that have come up to me directly, as I’ve been in different events or doing different things, saying, ‘This also happened to me. I almost lost my life,’” Simpson told Capital B Atlanta on Wednesday.
Despite increased restrictions against abortion in Georgia, demand for abortion continues in the state, with Black and Hispanic women seeking abortion care more than others. While the outcomes aren’t always fatal, the suffering these women have endured has motivated Black reproductive rights activists in Atlanta to work on campaigns to draw attention to Georgia’s restricted access in the November election.
Black Georgians overwhelmingly opposed the state’s abortion restrictions, which have been in place for two years and limit abortions to the first six weeks of pregnancy with few exceptions. A University of Georgia poll released in October 2022 revealed that more than 86% of Black residents strongly disapproved of the six-week restriction.
Simpson and other maternal health advocates with the Trust Black Women campaign will host a vigil and rally outside the Gold Dome in Atlanta at 2 p.m. on Saturday to “demand accountability” for Miller and Thurman’s “preventable” deaths.
The activists have attributed Miller and Thurman’s deaths to Georgia’s controversial law limiting the procedure from being performed after about six weeks of pregnancy unless the life of the mother is threatened. (Georgia law also allows abortions in cases of rape or incest to take place before 20 weeks if the expecting mother has filed a police report or if a doctor determines the fetus suffers from “congenital or chromosomal anomaly” that makes it unlikely to survive after birth.)
The stated goal of the rally is to emphasize the impact of Georgia’s controversial six-week limit on most abortions and issue a “call to action” to change the law at state and national levels. State Rep. Park Cannon, D-Atlanta, introduced legislation that would expand abortion rights in Georgia in 2022 and 2023, yet Georgia Republicans defeated both those measures during the last two legislative sessions.
Simpson expects abortion rights to play a crucial role in the battleground state’s upcoming presidential election between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump.
How Georgia leaders have responded to Miller and Thurman’s deaths
A pair of bombshell ProPublica stories published last week revealed harrowing and graphic details about Miller and Thurman’s respective abortion-related demises roughly two years ago.
Miller was a 41-year-old mother of three whose chronic health issues threatened her unexpected pregnancy in 2022. A medical examiner’s autopsy failed to determine the exact cause of Miller’s death after taking abortion pills, but medical records noted she ingested a “lethal combination of painkillers” after refusing to see a doctor due to Georgia’s abortion law, according to ProPublica, which cited accounts given by Miller’s family along with medical records stating she “had no history of drug use.”
Thurman was a 28-year-old aspiring nurse who died of septic shock in August 2022 after doctors in North Carolina apparently declined to perform a common dilation and curettage (D&C) procedure to remove fetal tissue from her uterus following her taking abortion pills in Georgia.
The Tar Heel State has had a 12-week abortion ban on the books since July 1, 2023. Maternal health providers have theorized such bans would cause doctors to think twice before performing some procedures, fearing they could be prosecuted or lose their licenses.
Republicans, including GOP Gov. Brian Kemp, have argued that exceptions included in Georgia’s abortion law, also known as the LIFE Act, allow women like Miller and Thurman to receive life-saving medical care. Last week, Kemp’s office suggested abortion rights advocates and reporters are partly to blame for Miller and Thurman’s deaths.
“They would likely both be alive today if partisan activists and so-called journalists had not spread such egregious misinformation and propaganda that fostered a culture of fear and confusion,” spokesperson Garrison Douglas told WSAV on Sept. 20.
Abortion rights supporters agree that confusion over the law has motivated doctors to deny treatment to patients like South Atlanta resident Yasmein Ziyad, a Black woman from Morrow, Georgia, who told Congress earlier this month that her physician refused to help treat her spontaneous miscarriage due to fear of prosecution.
Ziyad said she experienced “severe cramping,” bleeding, and pain “strong enough to stop me from doing anything,” as a result of her condition. She said she and her fiancé have now “given up on hopes of ever being pregnant again.”
“I didn’t have to go through this,” Ziyad told members of the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Human Rights on Sept. 16. “These laws created so much fear and confusion that I couldn’t get the care I needed; that would have spared me so much pain and suffering.”
Abortions are still happening
Maternal health treatment may have suffered in Georgia as a result of the state’s abortion law, but demand for abortions haven’t decreased at the state’s four Planned Parenthood clinics, according to Jaylen Black, spokesperson for Planned Parenthood Southeast.
Black said more women are seeking abortions earlier in their pregnancy as a result of the law.
“If anything, we’re trying to figure out ways to open up more appointments to see more patients, like being open on the weekend, later in the evening, because we want to see more patients and the demand is there,” Black told Capital B Atlanta on Thursday.
A 2019 Kaiser Family Foundation study revealed 65% of Georgia’s abortions are performed on Black women, even though Black men and women combined only make up about 33% of the state’s population. Black, who previously campaigned for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, said poverty and disparity in health care coverage are largely to blame for the enormous disparity.
“Eighty-two counties in Georgia don’t even have an OB-GYN,” said Black, citing data concerning Georgia’s maternal health care deserts. “This is going to impact lower-income people differently. It’s going to impact Black and Hispanic women and birthing people differently.”
Abortion rights take center stage ahead of Election Day
Activists expect more tragic stories like Thurman’s and Miller’s to surface and motivate abortion rights supporters to vote against Trump in the roughly six weeks left ahead of Election Day.
Harris has promised to sign legislation restoring the abortion rights protections previously included in the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark 1973 Roe. v. Wade decision, even if Congress has to end its filibuster rule to do so.
“We should eliminate the filibuster for Roe, and get us to the point where 51 votes would be what we need to actually put back in law the protections for reproductive freedom and for the ability of every person and every woman to make decisions about their own body and not have their government tell them what to do,” Harris told Wisconsin Public Radio on Tuesday.
During his presidential term, Trump nominated three of the six U.S. Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade two years ago, thereafter fulfilling a campaign promise he made to evangelical conservatives.
Last year, Trump boasted on social media about his role in eliminating federal abortion rights. Since then, he’s sought to distance himself from the issue, saying it’s now up to individual state governments to decide.
Abortion has become a political albatross around the necks of Trump and anti-abortion Republicans across the country. Many GOP candidates have lost races they were expected to win, with political analysts attributing those defeats to public backlash to the overturning of Roe.
Trump, in response, declined to endorse a national abortion ban in April, angering anti-abortion members of his conservative base. In August, his vice presidential nominee, U.S. Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, said Trump would veto federal legislation banning abortion. Trump declined to say the same when asked about Vance’s comments during his Sept. 10 debate against Harris.
“I’m not signing a ban, and there’s no reason to sign a ban,” Trump said during the debate. “It doesn’t matter, because this issue has now been taken over by the states.”
Still, Simpson says Trump is partly to blame for Miller and Thurman’s deaths “for stacking a Supreme Court with anti-abortion values.”
“He is [to blame],” Simpson said of Trump. “But so are our [governor] and state legislators who vote and create policies against [bodily] autonomy.”
“Mounted up and ready to go”
Harris and her Democratic Party supporters in Georgia have seized on the issue of abortion since ProPublica’s aforementioned stories made national news. The vice president addressed the subject during a campaign rally in Atlanta on Sept. 20, after reportedly meeting with members of Thurman’s family.
“I talked with her mother and her sisters about her, and they described such an extraordinary life of a person,” Harris said of Thurman. “I promised [Thurman’s mother], as she has asked, that we will make sure Amber is not just remembered as a statistic … so that people will know she was a mother and a daughter and a sister, and that she was loved and that she should be alive today.”
The overturn of Roe galvanized abortion rights supporters across the country in 2022, when many traveled to the polls to support ballot measures that enshrined abortion rights into state law in lieu of a federal legislation that would do the same nationally.
Voters in California, Michigan, and Vermont all cast ballots in support of constitutional amendments that would protect abortion rights. Even voters in conservative states like Kansas and Kentucky rejected amendments declaring there’s nothing in those states’ constitutions that establishes a right to an abortion. Montana voters rejected a related referendum that would have protected infants “born alive” from being “aborted.” (Murder is already illegal in the Treasure State and across the country.)
Black and Simpson declined to confirm whether abortion rights advocates are working with lawmakers on a bill to repeal Georgia’s abortion restrictions during next year’s legislative session.
“I don’t know that for sure right now, but I do know that we need our people to get mounted up and ready to go [in November],” Simpson said.
