By now, you’ve heard the tragic story of Amber Thurman, the Georgia woman whose death Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris blamed on that state’s abortion laws. The bitter, ironic truth is that Thurman was not a casualty of Georgia’s protective law but was a victim of ill-considered changes the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) made to abortion pill regulations under Biden-Harris and earlier Democrat administrations.

Pro-Publica broke the story on September 16. The story misrepresented many important details and left out a lot of critical context but pro-abortionists latched on to it nevertheless because the tragedy could be twisted to fit their preferred narrative of dangerous abortion limits.

A Tragic and Unnecessary Death

In the summer of 2022, Amber Thurman, pregnant with twins, sought a surgical abortion at nine weeks. Because Georgia had a law in place protecting an unborn child with a detectable heartbeat about six weeks gestation (measured from a woman’s last menstrual period or LMP) from abortion, Thurman sought an abortion in North Carolina, where there was no such limit in place at the time.

Running late because of traffic, she was unable to make her appointment for a surgical procedure. She was talked into taking mifepristone and misoprostol instead, two drugs that make up the “abortion pill,” which press accounts always stress is safe, safe, safe!

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Except that they weren’t. Over the next few days, after taking the pills and traveling home she began to experience painful cramping, vomiting and heavy bleeding. Thurman, who had previously been the picture of health, was transported to a local hospital there in her home state of Georgia. She was found to be still holding “tissue” from the pregnancy and eventually diagnosed with “acute severe sepsis.”

The standard treatment for a significant infection and an incomplete abortion (once the baby or babies have died, but material still remains in the uterus) is an emergency D&C (dilation and curettage). However, doctors kept monitoring the situation and giving antibiotics, discussing the possibility of a D&C the next day. By the time the doctor arrived the following afternoon and performed the surgery, Thurman had deteriorated to the point that she died on the operating table.

Blaming the Law

Abortion advocates and their media allies made it sound as if the delay was due to doctors being afraid of violating Georgia’s abortion law by performing the D&C. However there is no direct indication that the law had anything to do with the delay.

The law is clearly written to allow for surgery to remove already dead children (as was the case here) or even abortion whenever the mother’s life or health was at risk, which also clearly applied in these circumstances.

This was clearly not a failure of the law to accommodate the situation. And nothing in the Pro-Publica story gives us any reason to believe that doctors were sitting around waiting for some legal ruling to proceed from the hospital lawyer.

They simply observed the situation, made the call that a D&C might be warranted, but then just didn’t move fast enough.

Clearly, the story told by Vice President Kamala Harris and members of the press has been to spin a false narrative about women’s lives being put at risk by harsh, rigid, unrealistic laws that keep even the most basic medical emergencies from being addressed.

But what this false narrative obscures is not just the careful legislation that exists to protect both unborn children and their mothers, and the wise safeguards it puts in place for medical situations like these, but also what the real cause of these medical crises is.

A victim of Biden-Harris FDA negligence

While we don’t know all the details about Amber Thurman’s getting the abortion pill, we do know she wouldn’t have been given it if the original FDA distribution rules had been in place and were enforced.

Thurman was pregnant with twins and was at nine weeks gestation when she went in for her abortion. The original protocol from 2000 specified that use was limited to women no more than seven weeks pregnant (LMP) owing to the fact that safety and efficacy dropped off after that point.

Neither safety nor efficacy had demonstrably improved by 2016 when the Obama administration extended the deadline to ten weeks LMP. The FDA was anxious to placate the abortion industry who wanted to expand the market to make the pills available to women with later gestations.

The FDA also broadened the prescriber pool to include any “certified healthcare provider.” That meant that nurses, physician’s assistants, or maybe even med techs could prescribe and give out pills. The FDA also dropped required follow up visits to monitor the woman’s health and the progress and completion of her abortion.

Complications like Amber’s – hemorrhage, infection, incomplete abortion with retained tissue – were more common at these later gestations and knowledgeable, responsible doctors would have known to watch out for signs and treat these before things got desperate.

When Biden and Harris came into office, rather than restore these important safeguards, they pushed to water these down even further. They dropped all required visits, allowed for abortion pills to be sold online or in pharmacies and shipped directly to women’s homes without any in-person screening or counseling or follow up.

Stories appear to indicate that Thurman got her pills from the North Carolina abortion clinic and that she received some sort of counseling about the risks. Exactly how extensive or serious this was is unknown at this time.

We also don’t know how much, if at all, the clinic followed up with Thurman once she left the clinic.

We know they told her to go to the emergency room if complications developed. But we do not know if they gave her the name of someone who had an arrangement with the clinic or someone from her own area that was specifically trained to treat these sorts of complications. We don’t know whether the hospital she eventually went to was on any list recommended by the clinic.

The point is, under the new regulations, the “provider’s” direct obligations after delivering the pills ended with the provision of the advice and the name of someone to call. The only thing that the prescriber is required to do after providing these pills and this information is to contact the distributor and report if the patient dies.

Though we presume that the clinic passed on news of Thurman’s death to the distributor who then reported it to the FDA, we have no information that they followed up their patient once she left the clinic. A spokesperson for the clinic told ProPublica that they would have performed a D&C for free as soon as Thurman followed up, but being four hours away, she went to a hospital near her.

Part of the paperwork still required by the FDA is a patient guide and prescriber agreement to be signed by each certifying that risks have been made known. But recent modifications have made these less effective.

At one point a few years ago, the patient guide told women to tell emergency room personnel that they had taken the abortion pill so that they could provide appropriate treatment. However, the most recent agreement no longer gives such an instruction, allowing emergency room physicians to think they are merely treating an ordinary miscarriage.

The new regulations from the Biden-Harris administration put the burden on the patient to recognize signs of danger and get appropriate help, not the prescriber of the abortion pills. This left the possibility of possibly fatally delaying treatment and then leaving her fate in the hands of someone probably unfamiliar with how mifepristone and misoprostol work and how to treat complications that arose.

Biden-Harris: Promoting Abortion Market Rather than Abortion Safety

It cannot be overemphasized that before taking the abortion pills, Amber Thurman was a healthy woman with a healthy, natural, normal pregnancy.  Her body was working as it should and there was no special, imminent danger.

Her life was put at risk and her situation deteriorated once she took the abortion pills, abortion pills that the government told her were safe and effective when used as the FDA directed. She and her prescriber followed those instructions, instructions that the FDA under Biden-Harris decided were adequate to address persistent safety and efficacy concerns with the drug.

They were clearly not adequate in Thurman’s case.

Risk of failure and complications were greater for someone at her gestation. Under the circumstances, it would have been helpful if someone who understood that stayed in touch with her and monitored her situation.

It might have saved her life if the doctors treating knew she had taken the pills and understood more about how they worked and where things were headed.

But Biden and Harris’s FDA no longer thought those regulations were necessary.

The FDA, the administrations of Clinton, Obama, and Biden-Harris, and much of the abortion sympathetic medical establishment have decided that a certain number of deaths (32 in the FDA’s last count); a certain number of significant complications or serious adverse events (a couple of thousand hemorrhages, hospitalizations, serious infections, ruptured ectopic pregnancies, etc.) are acceptable.

In their calculations, a few Amber Thurmans, Holly Pattersons, Brenda Vises, etc., can be sacrificed for the greater cause of expanded chemical abortion access.

The law in Georgia tried to protect Thurman and her babies, and never got in the way of saving her life.  The regulations put in place by Biden-Harris tried to protect the abortion industry and market and ended up costing both Thurman and her babies their lives.

LifeNews.com Note: Randall O’Bannon, Ph.D., is the director of education and research for the National Right to Life Committee.