The deaths from abortion bans you won't hear about

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.

A second story involved a woman named Candi Miller, a 41-year-old mother of three, who had been told by doctors that "having another baby could kill her." Miller had lupus, diabetes and hypertension. She took abortion pills ordered online, and, like Thurman, had an incomplete abortion. In pre-Dobbs Georgia, this would not be a problem, because she could go to the emergency room and walk out a few hours, safe and pregnancy-free. Instead, she died in bed, afraid and in pain. The state committee that reviewed her case was also “preventable.”

Pro-abortion activists warned before and after the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health ruling that abortion bans would kill women. However, the three women whose stories have been reported are likely not the only ones. In Jessica Valenti’s new book, "Abortion: Our Bodies, Their Lies, and the Truths We Use to Win,” she posits that more deaths are happening, but the public just isn’t hearing about them, in part because activists want to protect families from the inevitable backlash if they go public with their stories.

Even with Thurman’s story, anti-abortion activists quickly went into victim-blaming mode. Another reason, Valenti speculated, was that Republican lawmakers have made it difficult for doctors to speak out in abortion bans states. “Coming forward with a patient’s story means risking your job and any future employment,” she wrote in her book, pointing to what happened to Dr. Caitlin Bernard, the provider in Indiana who treated a 10-year-old rape victim in Ohio. She was fined $3,000 and issued a letter of reprimand from the Indiana Medical Licensing Board.

“It’s easy for me to imagine the pressures put on doctors in Idaho, in Texas, in Mississippi, in Alabama,” Carole Joffe, a professor in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Reproductive Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco, told Salon. “You live in that community, your livelihood and your status in your community depend on getting along both with your medical colleagues and neighbors.”

Additionally, the bans prohibit doctors from providing immediate care, despite so-called exceptions. In September, a report from the University of California San Francisco’s Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health (ANSIRH) revealed more in-depth stories about how health care providers are unable to provide proper medical care to pregnant people in states with abortion bans. Through the accounts of 86 health care providers between September 2022 and August 2024, the report documented a range of harm occurring, such as situations of increased risk of death, complications and delays in care causing worsened health outcomes.

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“This study shows that abortion bans are fundamentally degrading medical care – not just in a single state or for a certain type of patient but for people with a range of health conditions living anywhere these bans are in place,” Dr. Kari White, executive director of Resound Research and study co-author, said in a media statement at the time.

Notably, maternal mortality rates were an issue even before Roe was overturned. According to research in Jama Network Open, maternal deaths increased during the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2022, that rate dropped to levels similar to pre-pandemic levels. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Black women die at twice the national rate, and three times more than white women. 

Dr. Daniel Grossman, ANSIRH Director and lead report author of the UCSF, told Salon via email that they are “hearing from doctors in states with abortion bans that they are being told by their employers or the hospitals where they work not to discuss cases related to emergency abortion care with the media.”

“Doctors may be even more reticent to discuss cases that involve a death because of concerns regarding malpractice litigation,” he said. “In addition, there may be a delay before these cases are examined by a state maternal mortality review committee, which is why the deaths of Amber Thurman and Candi Miller just recently came to light.”

He added that given the number of “near misses” they heard about in their study, where a patient suffered a complication and could have died if the delay had been longer, he said it’s “very likely” there have been other deaths.