Georgia Judge Lifts Abortion Ban After Deaths of Two Women — ProPublica

Women in Georgia can again legally have abortions after six weeks of pregnancy following a judge’s ruling strongly worded order this week repeal of the state ban. While Governor Brian Kemp spoke out against the decision and the Georgia Attorney General quickly appealed itthe providers told ProPublica that they immediately resumed such assistance.

Planned Parenthood’s four Georgia clinics are getting an influx of calls from in and around the state, where most abortions remain illegal, said Jaylen Black, vice president of marketing and communications for the organization’s Southeast region. Workers are also calling patients who previously had to be turned away. “We were able to move them,” Black said.

The new, albeit temporary, access is the latest in a wave of developments in the two weeks since ProPublica reported on Amber Nicole Thurman and Candy MillerGeorgia, women who died after not having access to legal abortions and timely medical care in their state. A committee of maternal health experts, including 10 doctors, felt that their deaths could be prevented by shifting the debate about such outcomes from hypotheticals to the new American reality.

“It’s not something that the state can easily sweep under the rug,” said Monica Simpson, chief executive of SisterSong, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit challenging the ban. “This is now a national issue.”

Women’s stories were heard through US Senate, vice presidential debates and demonstration outside the Georgia Capitol. Vice President Kamala Harris spoke with one of their families Oprah Winfreythen went to Atlanta to give a speech about them. “We now know that at least two women — and these are just the stories we know — here in the state of Georgia have died — because of Trump’s abortion ban,” she told the crowd. Before launching into the details of the first, she led the crowd in chants to “say my name: Amber Nicole Thurman, Amber Nicole Thurman, Amber Nicole Thurman.”

Thurman died on August 19, 2022, a month after Georgia passed a law banning abortions before many women even knew they were pregnant. Thurman traveled to North Carolina, where she received medication to terminate the pregnancy, and did not fully remove the fetal tissue.

She was looking for custody a rare complication at a suburban Atlanta hospital where she was diagnosed with sepsis, a life-threatening infection. As her condition worsened, doctors discussed a procedure called a dilation and curettage, or D&C, to empty the uterus; the state has recently criminalized its enforcement, with few exceptions. It took doctors 20 hours after Thurman arrived, according to records reviewed by ProPublica. It came too late.

Miller, who died on November 12, 2022, had lupus, diabetes and hypertension, and doctors warned that another pregnancy could kill her. She ordered abortion pills online, but she also didn’t expel all the fetal tissue and needed a D&C. Her family later told the coroner that she had not seen a doctor “due to current pregnancy and abortion legislation”. For days, her children watched her suffer in bed, moaning in pain. Eventually she took a lethal combination of painkillers.

The Georgia Maternal Mortality Review Committee, which is tasked with studying the deaths of pregnant women and new mothers to recommend better care, directly blamed Miller’s death on the state’s abortion ban, according to members who spoke to ProPublica on condition of anonymity. The committee found that the hospital’s delay in performing a critical procedure on Thurman had a “major” impact on her “preventable” outcome. The hospital and the doctors involved in her care did not explain the delay or comment on her case; an attorney hired by Thurman’s family said the hospital had legal rights to perform the procedure.

While advocates of the ban said it included an exception to save the mother’s life, doctors told ProPublica that the language did not take into account the fast-paced realities of emergency care or the complexities of maternal health.

Although Miller’s underlying medical conditions would have made her pregnancy more risky as it progressed, that alone did not make her eligible for an abortion. And once she and Thurman needed a D&C to clear fetal tissue, neither of their cases seemed to clearly fit the language of the exclusionary ban that allowed doctors to do it.

It allows doctors to remove a “dead unborn child” resulting from a “voluntary abortion,” defined as a “natural” miscarriage or stillbirth. Thurman told doctors that her miscarriage was not spontaneous, but the result of birth control pills. Most of the bans, including Georgia’s, also allow abortions “necessary to prevent the death of the pregnant woman or the substantial and irreversible physical impairment of a major bodily function.” There is no standard protocol for how providers should interpret such language, doctors told ProPublica — or how far along a patient must be to qualify.

Forty one senator introduced a resolution inspired by a ProPublica report calling on hospitals in all states to provide emergency abortion care when patients need it. Senator Ron WydenOregon Democrat, who chairs the powerful Senate Finance Committee, has pending review of information request from the hospital that treated Thurman to determine whether doctors violated a federal law requiring them to provide emergency care. (The hospital did not respond to ProPublica’s requests for comment on these questions about its adherence to the law.)

And in Georgia, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert SI McBurney on Monday struck down key parts of a state ban that criminalized virtually all abortions after about six weeks.

“A lawmaker, a judge or a commander from The Handmaid’s Tale should not be telling these women what to do with their bodies during this period when the fetus cannot survive outside the womb,” McBurney said in the ruling.

“The court believes that until the pregnancy is viable, a woman’s right to make decisions about her body and her health remains private and protected, i.e. remains only her business. If someone other than the pregnant woman can support the fetus, then — and only then — should those other voices have a say in the debate about the decisions a pregnant woman makes about her body and what grows inside it.”

In overturning the six-week ban, McBurney reverted to the state’s previous standard, which allowed abortions until the fetus was deemed viable, around the 22nd week of pregnancy.

Kemp, a Republican who said he was “overjoyed” when the ban first took effect, said this week through a spokesman: “Once again, the will of Georgians and their representatives has been overridden by the personal beliefs of one judge.”

The ruling marks the second time McBurney has blocked a state abortion ban.

In 2022 he issued a decree that the law was unconstitutional when the state legislature passed it in 2019, frozen on the books until the US Supreme Court overturned the federal constitutional right to abortion three years later. The state appealed, and its Supreme Court reinstated the ban until he can review McBurney’s ruling.

About a year later, with the ban still in place, the state Supreme Court rejected the argument, sending the case back to McBurney to hear the suit’s central issue: whether the Georgia Constitution protects a right to privacy and, if so, whether that right includes abortion. McBurney’s ruling Monday emphatically says yes.

Although McBurney allowed abortion to resume in Georgia, the Supreme Court may again delay the judge’s ruling until he takes up the case.

The last time this was done, the abortion access window in Georgia lasted eight days.

The relevance and impermanence of this moment in Georgia was palpable in conversations with providers. “I think this type of moment definitely feels like a requirement to provide a lot of help to as many people as possible,” said Kristen Baker, public affairs manager and lobbyist for the Feminist Center for Women’s Health, which runs the Georgia clinic.

Black said Planned Parenthood officials are doing everything they can — “at this point” — to meet the demand and “get people to our doors as quickly as possible.”