Amber Nicole Thurman, a young mother from Georgia, died in 2022 from infection following a chemical abortion. As recently reported, her heartbreaking death was certainly preventable, but, contrary to what many are claiming, the state’s abortion law did not stand in the way of saving her life.
The 28-year-old medical assistant had obtained abortion drugs from an abortion clinic in North Carolina, where induced abortion is legal at nine weeks’ gestation. Thurman took the first drug, mifepristone, at the clinic. Staff instructed her to take the second drug, misoprostol, at home and visit her emergency room if she faced complications.
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
After experiencing increasingly concerning symptoms over the next several days — heavy bleeding, vomiting blood and fainting — she was transported by ambulance to the hospital. Despite being found to have retained tissue in her uterus (a common complication of this kind of abortion at nine weeks) and starting antibiotics for sepsis (a life-threatening infection), her condition worsened to the point of requiring open abdominal surgery. Tragically, she did not make it out of surgery.
The reason Georgia’s abortion law isn’t responsible for Thurman’s death is simple: It explicitly allows physicians to intervene in cases of medical emergencies or if the fetus has no detectable heartbeat (both of which applied to Thurman’s case), and any assertion that she experienced a delay in care as a secondary effect of the law is mere speculation. One thing is clear: Thurman died from a legal chemical abortion, which abortion advocates have long argued is “safer than Tylenol.”
Thurman’s story proves otherwise — as do countless other women’s.
One of my most memorable patients as an obstetric hospitalist was a woman facing alarming side effects of mifepristone. She suffered heavy bleeding, retained tissue, an infection and acute kidney injury, which required surgery, antibiotics and a blood transfusion. My patient was duped into believing that this process would be quick and easy. Unfortunately, stories like hers and Thurman’s are becoming increasingly common as the false narrative that mifepristone is safe influences our nation’s health care policy.
Pro-choice advocates are promoting the message that the abortion drugs can be consumed with little to no medical supervision. A recent study found that the share of women who use these drugs to self-manage an abortion jumped from 2.4% in 2021 to 3.4% in 2023. Undergoing induced abortions largely alone puts women at risk for the same kinds of complications that my patient and Thurman endured.
This increase in unsupervised abortions was enabled by the Food and Drug Administration’s efforts to deregulate mifepristone starting in 2016. These changes made many pill-induced abortions essentially self-managed as they removed the physician from the patient-physician relationship. Furthermore, last June’s U.S. Supreme Court decision to dismiss a challenge to this deregulation without engaging with the plaintiffs’ arguments means that this trend of abortions without medical oversight will likely continue.
When it originally approved mifepristone in 2000, the FDA included several requirements guiding how this risky drug can be dispensed, mitigating its potential harms. For example, mifepristone could only be given by certified physicians to women up to seven weeks’ gestation after an in-person appointment. Two follow-up visits were also required to screen for complications.
However, the FDA gradually removed those safeguards without good evidence to justify those decisions. Today, these drugs can be ordered online with no prior in-person doctor’s visit and no follow-up. This means women are given abortion drugs without first getting an ultrasound or an exam to confirm how far along their pregnancy is and rule out risk factors for potentially life-threatening complications. These women are then left to manage a painful, risky and potentially traumatic induced abortion at home alone without help from medical professionals.
This substandard care is unacceptable. Yet the FDA allows women across the country to be sold the lie that this is safe — women like my patient. As she recovered from her ordeal, she told me that she had ordered abortion drugs online; the supplier told her that the pills would come from India and left her to undergo the whole process alone.
My patient and Thurman are far from the only ones whom the FDA failed to protect. The FDA’s own label states that 1 in 25 women will need to visit the emergency room after taking mifepristone.
It is tragic experiences like theirs that the FDA was formed to protect Americans from. It is because of the FDA’s negligence that this is allowed to happen.
I am calling on our nation’s leaders to commit to holding the FDA accountable and protecting the health and safety of women and girls over and against the interests of the abortion industry.
Christina Francis, a board-certified obstetrician-gynecologist and practicing obstetric hospitalist, is chief executive officer of the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists.
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