Safety issues with medication abortion are extremely rare, experts emphasize

Two Georgia mothers, Amber Thurman and Candi Miller, died in 2022 because of a lack of care most likely tied to the state’s abortion ban, the nonprofit news outlet ProPublica reported this week. Both experienced complications after taking abortion medications, the reporting said — complications, doctors emphasized, that are exceedingly rare and entirely treatable.

Two Georgia mothers, Amber Thurman and Candi Miller, died in 2022 because of a lack of care most likely tied to the state’s abortion ban, the nonprofit news outlet ProPublica reported this week. Both experienced complications after taking abortion medications, the reporting said — complications, doctors emphasized, that are exceedingly rare and entirely treatable. “To read about a mom just trying to make the best decisions for herself and her family die from something completely preventable in the United States – I don’t think ‘tragedy’ is a strong enough word,” said Dr. Ghazaleh Moayedi, an obstetrician/gynecologist and founder of Pegasus Health Justice Center in Dallas. According to the report, Thurman received abortion medication from a clinic in North Carolina shortly after abortion was banned after six weeks in her home state of Georgia, and she went to her local hospital with a severe infection days later, after her body didn’t expel all of the fetal tissue. “There should not have been a second of waiting” for her to receive care, Moayedi told CNN. “She should have immediately been taken for a uterine aspiration,” a procedure that removes the contents of the uterus, performed for both abortion and miscarriage care. Instead, ProPublica reported, Thurman didn’t receive surgical care to remove the fetal tissue for 20 hours. The report said it’s not clear from Thurman’s records why doctors waited so long, but noted the procedure had been criminalized just weeks before by the state’s abortion ban, after the US Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade that summer. Thurman’s heart stopped during surgery, the outlet reported, after she’d been diagnosed at the hospital with acute severe sepsis and went into organ failure. According to a second report, Miller didn’t seek care at a hospital at all, even — as her son told ProPublica — she was bedridden with pain for days after taking medication abortion pills. A report from the Clayton County medical examiner, obtained by CNN, cited a conversation with her husband in which he indicated that she “did not go to an ob/gyn due to the current legislations on pregnancies and abortions.”