“Preventable and Predictable:” Georgia Women At Extraordinary Risk

Trump’s signature accomplishment is a Supreme Court that overturned Roe and undid a national right to abortion care, and now one in three US women lives under a Trump abortion ban. Sadly Georgia women are among them. We already had a maternal health crisis in Georgia even before Republicans’ six-week abortion ban, as Georgia is one of the ten states with the highest maternal mortality rates, with 33.9 deaths per 100k live births. Add in the failure of Brian Kemp to expand Medicaid, which has left 60% of rural hospitals on the brink of closure, and the picture becomes clear of younger, poorer, nonwhite women being disproportionately harmed by care disparities and healthcare deserts. (Source for map graphic.)

When Georgia legislators, Forsyth’s Greg Dolezal chief among them, sought to institute a ban on abortions after the sixth week of pregnancy, doctors and women’s health advocates warned them that a ban would keep women from getting all kinds of needed healthcare, not limited to abortion. Now it has become apparent, in new reporting this week on the deaths of two young mothers, that those fears were well-founded.

Amber Thurman waited in a hospital for over 20 hours as she became septic, because doctors would not perform a routine D&C to remove unexpelled fetal tissue left from a legal medication abortion. The medical team feared running afoul of Georgia’s abortion ban, which would sentence a doctor to up to a decade in prison. By the time doctors judged Thurman’s life to be sufficiently endangered by her infection, she could not be saved, and died leaving a six year-old child. The official state Georgia Maternal Mortality Review Committee (MMRC) ruled that she should not have died of her treatable illness.  

Fear of Dealing with GA’s Compromised Medical System
Candi Miller was a mother of three with a complicated and fragile medical history of lupus and diabetes, and was afraid that her unplanned pregnancy would endanger her life. She was also afraid to seek medical care in Georgia, and instead opted for a medication abortion, which left her needing a follow-up D&C. She died of septic shock at home, a death that was ruled “preventable” by the Georgia MMRC. 

In her appearance to discuss women’s healthcare in Atlanta on September 20, Vice President Harris said that deaths resulting from Georgia’s abortion ban were “not only preventable, but predictable,” because the law has created dangerous confusion for doctors about when they’re allowed to provide life-saving care. And that confusion costs precious time. Delay can be fatal, as it was for Thurman, Miller, and surely others. To those who defend Georgia’s ban, insisting that it allows for exceptions to save a woman’s life, be aware that in states with exceptions, the exceptions are rarely granted. These exceptions serve only to give a gloss of reasonableness to harsh and unreasonable restrictions.

Further, it is no accident that both Candi Miller and Amber Thurman were women of color. Georgia has the worst racial maternal mortality ratio of any state in the country: Black women are 3.3 times more likely to die from pregnancy-related complications than White women in the state, and Black babies are twice as likely to die. 

The Choice in November is Clear and Drastic
The positions of the two Presidential candidates are clear: Harris would codify the protections of Roe v. Wade. Trump has often said that overturning Roe is the thing he’s most proud of, and that abortion rights need to be decided by states. But a National Abortion Ban remains a possibility under a Trump presidency; he refuses to say whether he would veto one or not, twisting in the wind depending on his audience, often leaving JD Vance to reassure his extremist base that he is still with them.

Project 2025 would enshrine a national ban, as well as increased surveillance for pregnancies and miscarriages. Also in Project 2025: A plan to end medication abortion, currently accounting for 60% of abortions, by enforcing the Comstock Act, a nineteenth-century anti-obscenity law, which they construe to forbid the mailing of abortion medication.

It’s not only abortion that is under attack by Republicans, but your very right to choose how and when to become a parent. On birth control, Trump has indicated he would be open to laws banning or restricting contraception. What used to be a far fringe position--that contraception should be restricted or banned--is increasingly finding its way into mainstream Republican rhetoric, and we have previously examined the logic and tactics by which this could be accomplished. Georgia women already struggle with access to contraception, with nearly a third of women reporting they have faced barriers to getting birth control. And 60% of pregnancies in Georgia are unplanned.

For those seeking to add to their families using advanced reproductive technologies, just last week, Republican Senators again blocked a bill that would have guaranteed access to IVF. This is all of a piece with the extreme conservative goal of enshrining “fetal personhood” as a life-begins-at-conception ideology. In Georgia, in 2021, the most recent year for which we have data, 2% of all births resulted from IVF, for 2,321 live births, resulting from 5,167 transferred embryos. State Senator Elena Parent proposed two bills protecting the right to contraception and the right to IVF in the most recent legislative session, but they did not advance.

Clearly, in Georgia, pregnant women, infants, and women of childbearing age are dangerously vulnerable to bad healthcare policy and punitive Republican restrictions on reproductive health. What can you do? Know the facts. Inform yourself on what policies lead to better health outcomes for women and children and vote accordingly. Our local candidates for state legislature fully support the right of everyone to make choices, guided by their doctors, to determine their own reproductive futures. ​