Amber Nicole Thurman died of septic shock with “retained products of conception” in late summer 2022. Just a few weeks before, the overturn of Roe v. Wade triggered Georgia’s state law banning abortions from the sixth week of pregnancy. Thurman’s death, when recently examined by the State of Georgia’s maternal mortality review board, was deemed “preventable.” Georgia doctors did not immediately remove the dead infant remains from her uterus when Thurman arrived at the hospital in critical condition, having taken pills to chemically abort her twin babies at nine weeks’ gestation. 

Candi Miller, also from Georgia, ordered her abortion pills online. The Dutch supplier Aid Access, which imports its pills from India, sends DIY abortion kits all over the world, including to approximately 7,000 U.S. customers each month. Miller did not know how far along she was in her fourth pregnancy when she took the pills, only that she was afraid of the state’s new law banning abortions and equally afraid of being pregnant again due to chronic diabetes and lupus. When she died at home a few days later, her autopsy revealed high doses of diphenhydramine (the active ingredient in Benadryl), acetaminophen (found in painkillers such as Tylenol), as well as fentanyl in Miller’s body. The founder of Aid Access, Dr. Rebecca Gomperts, told ProPublica “it was clear the abortion pill did not cause [Miller’s] death,” even though Miller was not in critical condition until immediately after taking the pills.  

Somehow, these two stories are supposed to mean legalizing more abortion would prevent more deaths. Bans cause doctors to deny women life-saving procedures—never mind that no life-saving would be needed had these mothers not taken abortion pills in the first place—and therefore, bans kill. ProPublica notes at the end of its report that “no doctor has been prosecuted for violating abortion bans,” but who knows when one might? 

The publication of Thurman and Miller’s stories this week has already brought a flurry of Democratic statements on the danger of abortion bans for the health of women. The spin, however, cannot remain unburdened by what has been: Miller didn’t die because she was pregnant. She died in the process of attempting to take her unborn child’s life, with $80 mail-order abortion pills and fentanyl besides. Thurman didn’t develop sepsis because she was pregnant. She developed it because she tried to end her pregnancy using an FDA-approved drug under FDA-approved circumstances. The buck does not stop with the doctors who failed to save her life after that fact. 

Mifepristone, the active ingredient in Mifeprex, is responsible for the majority of abortions performed in the United States today. It is typically prescribed in tandem with misoprostol, and the pair is said to be 99 percent effective. Indeed, Jen Villavicencio, an OB-GYN at the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, boasts, “Research shows that when people have access to accurate information about how to manage their abortions, they can do so safely on their own.” Apparently, this is good enough reason for ACOG to be a full-throated supporter of the libertarian approach to abortifacient access that lead to Miller’s and Thurman’s deaths. 

Despite the experts’ insistence to the contrary, Miller and Thurman are far from the only women to have suffered complications from attempted chemical abortions at home. This is precisely the problem Erin Hawley sought to rectify through the Supreme Court earlier this year, in FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, an appeal for restraint in drug access which the “radically” “conservative” Supreme Court declined to grant. Complications are four times more likely after a chemical abortion than after a surgical one, but since 2016 the FDA has stopped recording adverse events related to chemical abortions, tallying only deaths. 

The most common side effect of a chemical abortion seems to be an incomplete removal of all the dead baby parts. If the drug regimen fails to adequately purge a woman’s womb, she is at a high risk for septic infection, which must be treated at a hospital by surgically dilating her cervix and scraping her uterus of the child’s remains—the salubrious “D&C.” Mifepristone’s effectiveness in purging the womb decreases significantly after the eighth week, according to a survey of numerous clinical trials, yet it is FDA-approved for abortive purposes through the 10th week of pregnancy, and even recommended into the 11th week by the Association of American Medical Colleges, with as little preparation as a single phone consultation. That’s exactly how Thurman used it. A North Carolina abortion establishment sold her the pills as a stop-gap solution when she didn’t make her appointment in time. She ingested the pills before making the four-hour drive back home to Georgia without any apparent concern. A day or so later found her vomiting blood and passed out on her apartment floor, the point at which her boyfriend saw fit to call for help. 

The experts concluded these deaths were preventable. Undeniably, this much is true. For unexplained reasons, Thurman’s doctors did not perform a D&C on her until 20 hours after she arrived at the hospital, despite it being legal in the state of Georgia to do so in case of danger to the life of the mother. But the North Carolina abortion shop handing out deadly pills like candy to a woman from the next state over, rather than lose a customer, should also be subject to investigation. Miller’s death, likewise, would have been far less likely were it not as easy to buy abortifacient pills online as it is to buy a pair of sneakers.

It is impossible to recount these stories without highlighting the deeper problems at stake, which go beyond the corruption endemic in our medical establishment and federal drug bureaucracy. If we can say Thurman’s death, in particular, was preventable by legalizing child murder—and the mother-saving procedures that too often must accompany it—we can certainly also say it was preventable by marriage, by fatherly responsibility, and yes, by chastity, that long-neglected virtue. Likewise, it is quite clear that inhibiting access to deadly drugs of all sorts would have been better for Miller’s whole family. Much, indeed, was preventable. 

But one does not need to be convinced of conservatism to see this. The bare language renders a conclusion in favor of abortion libertarianism impossible. How is it that Thurman and Miller’s deaths must be called “maternal” deaths, but the dead children clinging to their uterine lining are nothing more than “fetal tissue”? How can we say these women died as mothers but their babies did not die as children, at least not children these mothers could have had any obligation toward? The concept of mother insists on a relationship, and a child whose existence cannot simply be denied when it is not desired.