Amber Nicole Thurman’s death from an infection in 2022 is believed to be the first confirmed maternal fatality linked to post-Roe bans.
Reproductive justice advocates have been warning for more than two years that the end of Roe v. Wade would lead to surge in maternal mortality among patients denied abortion care—and that the increase was likely to be greatest among low-income women of color. Now, a new report by ProPublica has uncovered the first such verified death. A 28-year-old medical assistant and Black single mother in Georgia died from a severe infection after a hospital delayed a routine medical procedure that had been outlawed under that state’s six-week abortion ban.
Amber Nicole Thurman’s death, in August 2022, was officially deemed “preventable” by a state committee tasked with reviewing pregnancy-related deaths. Thurman’s case is the first time a preventable abortion-related death has come to public attention since the Supreme Court overturned Roe, ProPublica’s Kavitha Surana reported.
Now, “we actually have the substantiated proof of something we already knew—that abortion bans kill people,” said Mini Timmaraju, president of the abortion-rights group Reproductive Freedom for All, during a call with media. “It cannot go on.”
^ This is the only attempt at an objective argument in this entire thread and it is not the argument presented by the OPs story, which was the point I was trying to make.
Maternal mortality includes abortions though: A maternal death is defined by the World Health Organization as “the death of a woman while pregnant or within 42 days of termination of pregnancy".
Hey, I actually missed that part. (I assumed it was deaths relating to the pregnancy itself, not including additional procedures like abortions)
Still, 17.4 - 0.45 = 16.95, which is still substantially higher than the case fatality rate of abortion-related fatalities alone.