Written by Elijah Shoults
Candi Miller was a mother of three who had chronic ailments. She was 41 years old, had lupus, diabetes, and hypertension, and doctors had told her that having another baby could kill her. Mrs. Miller was a resident of Georgia, a state which had recently banned abortions without making exceptions for people with chronic illnesses like hers. When she found out that she’d unintentionally gotten pregnant she decided to order abortion pills online and take them at home. Although the pills are over 90% effective when taken correctly Mrs. Miller was one of the unfortunate cases where complications developed. Afraid that she could be prosecuted if she sought medical help, she decided to stay home in the hopes that she would get better. Tragically, she didn’t, she suffered in pain for several days and was then found dead.
Amber Thurman was a single mother who had just moved out of her parents home and into her own apartment. She loved spending time with her son and was planning on enrolling in nursing school when she discovered she was pregnant with twins. She decided that this wasn’t the right time to have more children, but she had just passed the six-week mark when Georgia’s ban went into effect. She scheduled an abortion with a clinic in North Carolina, which still allowed it at that stage. However, she got stuck in a traffic jam and missed her appointment, by the time she arrived all the clinic could do was give her abortion pills. She took them, but ultimately developed complications. She was taken to a local hospital, but the doctors there were unsure of how to proceed under the newly-enacted law. They discussed performing a dilation and curettage (D&C), but attempted other treatments first. After 20 hours they finally operated, but by then it was too late and she died during surgery.
Taysha Wilkinson-Sobieski was a happily married mother in Indiana who experienced an ectopic pregnancy. The Indy Star reported that although her local hospital was nearby, its maternity ward had recently closed, and she had to seek care much further away. After Roe v. Wade was overturned and states enacted strict abortion bans more and more doctors have avoided taking up practice in states with abortion bans. Some have even left the state where they were practicing, leading to facilities having to be closed. In situations like Taysha’s time is of the utmost importance, and even though she was eventually able to get to a hospital the doctors were unable to save her.
These cases are some of the first to come to light since Roe was overturned in 2022, there are almost certainly more. Medical review committees like the one in Georgia are normally looking at cases which are already years old, so a lag in reporting is common. These cases exemplify how even with so-called “exceptions for medical emergencies”, having politicians imposing their opinions on doctors and threatening them with felony prison time adds doubt and confusion to a medical event where the answers are not always obvious and doctors have to make a judgement call. Doctors can’t always tell with absolute certainty whether or not a patient, in that very moment, is going to live or die. So what often happens in cases like these is that doctors will wait until the woman’s health has deteriorated to the point that she’s on death’s door, because sometimes that’s the only way to know for sure that an abortion is necessary to save her life.
Proponents of abortion bans have said that they’re not seeking to prosecute women, however the plain text of the laws themselves often leaves open that possibility. Even the threat of jail time can have a chilling effect on seeking appropriate care. In Georgia, DA Ryan Leonard once threatened that women could be prosecuted for getting an abortion. An over-zealous prosecutor can have people arrested and charged with crimes, and even if the charges are later thrown out the process can seriously damage a person’s life. Brittany Watts and Amari Marsh are both women who had charges filed against them after having miscarriages. In both cases the charges were dropped after their grand juries decided not to indict them. So even though they had done nothing wrong and had just gone through the trauma of losing a pregnancy, they had to suffer through being traumatized again by unscrupulous prosecutors.
Republicans have wanted to institute a national abortion ban for a long time. This year’s RNC platform is the first time in 40 years that such a ban wasn’t part of the platform, and many staunch Republicans are unhappy about that. Clearly Trump pushed to have that language removed because he knows that such an idea is so unpopular that it would hurt his chances of getting reelected.
However, even if a full ban wasn’t implemented there are many plans in the works to make it more difficult for women to have access to abortions. Project 2025 is a conservative policy blueprint put out by the Heritage Foundation, over a hundred former Trump staffers helped to write it. It calls for implementing regulations which would make it more difficult to obtain abortion medication, possibly even re-interpreting an 1800s-era law to prevent them from being mailed at all. It also wants to remove protections under the Emergency Medical Treatment And Labor Act (EMTALA) and defund Planned Parenthood and other healthcare providers which include abortions in their services.
While Trump has sought to distance himself from Project 2025, the document is an accurate wishlist of the far-right in this country. If Congressional Republicans passed anti-abortion measures, even if they went so far as to pass a national ban, they could employ the common legislative tactic of including the ban inside another important bill. Can we really trust Trump to veto a bill like that? Medical decisions should be left between patients and their doctors. Whether or not we as individuals would approve of a particular abortion under various circumstances, we don’t have the medical knowledge or first-hand experience to interfere with a woman’s life when she has to make that decision. Kamala Harris knows that we should trust women, and she will protect women’s rights to choose.