After reports emerged that two women died as a result of Georgia’s six-week abortion ban, abortion opponents are callously using their tragic deaths to fuel false claims that abortion pills are dangerous and to push for FDA removal of mifepristone from the market. Rather than calling on legislators to clarify life-saving exceptions, abortion opponents are doubling down on misinformation they’ve been peddling for years about the safety of abortion pills.
Last week, an official state committee investigating maternal mortality in Georgia said the deaths were preventable and, in one case, caused by the doctors delaying necessary care because of the state abortion ban’s threat of criminal penalties.
The two women—Amber Nicole Thurman and Candi Miller—both used abortion pills obtained from out of state. Complications from abortion pills are very rare: Only about 0.4 percent of cases require follow-up care. Despite an exception in the Georgia law for life-saving care, doctors refused necessary medical care to Thurman. Miller feared going to the hospital because of the ban.
Thurman had traveled to North Carolina to obtain the medications in person, but had to return home right away for her job and to care for her 6-year-old son. She went to Piedmont Henry Hospital in Atlanta, but was denied care for 20 hours, causing her to die from a septic infection.
A routine procedure, called a dilation and curettage (D&C), could have cleared the remaining fetal tissue from her uterus, but doctors refused to offer this critical care because they feared that Georgia prosecutors would charge them with violating the state’s six-week abortion ban. The law’s vague exception for life-saving care and the potential penalty of 10 years in jail were enough to cause doctors to refuse life-saving care to Thurman.
Complications from abortion pills are very rare: Only about 0.4 percent of cases require follow-up care.
Miller, who suffered from lupus, diabetes and hypertension, became pregnant at 41. Her doctors told her the pregnancy could kill her, but they would not provide her life-saving care because of the state’s abortion ban. As a result, Miller obtained abortion pills from a telehealth provider located outside of the country.
After taking the pills, she experienced ongoing pain but did not go to a hospital because she feared arrest. Georgia, like all other states banning abortion, prohibits medical providers located in the state from offering abortion care, but does not make it a crime for women to use abortion pills, despite some inaccurate media reports to the contrary.
She later took a lethal dose of painkillers and died, leaving behind three children. An autopsy revealed unexpelled fetal tissue. The state maternal health committee ruled Miller’s death was not caused by the abortion medication, and that it was preventable.
The antiabortion movement has for years argued, contrary to all medical evidence, that abortion pills are unsafe. Now that their abortion bans are blocking needed follow-up medical care for women experiencing rare medical complications from abortions pills, they are using the deaths of these women to argue that abortion pills are unsafe—rather than admitting that abortion bans blocking access to medical care is what caused the deaths of Thurman and Miller.
“Patients can safely and effectively use mifepristone at home for medication abortion,” according to the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecologists.
Since the FDA approved mifepristone in 2000, close to 6 million women have safely used the medication for abortion. There is less than a 0.3 percent risk of serious complications. According to the FDA, there have been five deaths for every 1 million people in the U.S. who used the drug—a death rate of 0.0005 percent. Most of these fatalities were not caused by the medication but were caused by intentional and accidental drug overdoses, suicide, homicide and ruptured ectopic pregnancies. Eleven involved infections from unexpelled pregnancy tissue.
“Providers of both pill abortions and abortions done with instruments (‘aspiration’ or ‘surgical’ abortions) know that retained tissue can happen with either method and with miscarriages as well,” said Dr. Linda Prine, who works for telemedicine abortion provider Aid Access. “Most of the time the body clears the retained tissue on its own with some prolonged cramping and bleeding. In the rare cases where someone comes in for care with a fever and pelvic pain, there is an urgent need to do a D&C. This is Abortion Care 101—which is not being taught in far too many places in the U.S., due to antiabortion stigma. The abortion bans have made this trend worse.”
Georgia ranks in the top 10 states for maternal mortality. Black women are almost three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related complications than white women. Both Thurman and Miller were Black women.
Elisa Wells of Plan C condemned “the harms that the bans are doing by preventing people from obtaining care to begin with, causing fear that prevents people from seeking follow-up care when they need it, and causing medical providers and institutions to be afraid of and to delay providing follow up care.” The Plan C website shares information about reliable providers of abortion pills and where to find support for using them safely at home.
Eight states now allow telehealth abortion providers to serve patients in states with bans, and over two dozen providers are sending abortion pills to approximately 10,000 people living in restrictive states each month. Medication abortion comprised 63 percent of all abortions in the United States in 2023, and telehealth abortion made up 20 percent of all abortion care nationally in March 2024, an increase from 4 percent nationally in April 2022.
“Amber and Candi’s deaths show us the tragic truth of what abortion, reproductive health, and maternal justice experts have long stated: Abortion bans are deadly,” said Wells. “The only acceptable outcomes of this news are to accelerate policy protections as urgent and mandatory, and share more complete comprehensive information about resources and support for abortion access in all possible forms.”
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