Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris and her supporters in the media want Americans to believe pro-life legislation and Donald Trump are to blame for the deaths of two Georgia women who died from complications after taking abortion-inducing drugs.
But Dr. Christina Francis, CEO of the American Association of Pro-Life OB/GYNs (AAPLOG), asserts that Harris and her surrogates are spreading “dangerous lies” and using the deaths of these two women to promote abortion rights – a central plank of the Democratic Party platform.
Harris blamed Georgia’s pro-life law – and Trump – for the deaths of Amber Thurman and Candi Miller, women who took abortion pills to end their pregnancies.
“Women are bleeding out in parking lots, turned away from emergency rooms, losing their ability to ever have children again,” Harris posted to X last week, adding that “[s]urvivors of rape and incest are being told they cannot make decisions about what happens next to their bodies. And now women are dying. These are the consequences of Donald Trump’s actions.”
Pro-Publica led the montage of pro-abortion rights stories that claim the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade is causing women to die.
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“At least two women in Georgia died after they couldn’t access legal abortions and timely medical care in their state, ProPublica has found,” claimed a report last week.
“Georgia’s ‘pro-life’ abortion ban literally killed a woman,” MSNBC headlined its story about Thurman, adding the 28-year-old “died a completely avoidable death in a Georgia hospital because the doctors treating her were terrified of committing a felony under the state’s abortion ban.”
Pro-Publica reported that Thurman died in 2022 after being hospitalized for an infection that developed after she took abortion pills in North Carolina since she was more than six weeks pregnant with her twins. Georgia’s law limits abortion after six weeks, but clearly permits the procedure when the mother’s life or physical health is endangered. When Thurman arrived at the emergency room in Georgia, her twins were already dead, but “she had not expelled all of the fetal tissue from her body” and needed a “dilation and curettage, or D&C.”
“But just that summer, her state had made performing the procedure a felony, with few exceptions,” Pro-Publica continued. “Any doctor who violated the new Georgia law could be prosecuted and face up to a decade in prison.”
The outlet reported that doctors “monitored her infection spreading, her blood pressure sinking and her organs beginning to fail,” and decided to operate after 20 hours – when it was already too late.
Similarly, Candi Miller, another Georgia mother, died after taking abortion-inducing drugs and, reportedly, in reaction to the media’s false claim that she could be prosecuted under her state’s law, did not act to obtain emergency medical treatment.
Francis, an OB/GYN, posted two videos to X last week urging Harris and her media allies to stop their “dangerous lies” to women:
After watching Harris’ comments in Atlanta about the deaths of Thurman and Miller, Francis said on Wednesday that she agrees both women’s deaths were “100% preventable.”
“However, their deaths were not the fault of Georgia’s abortion law,” Francis said:
No pro-life law in the country prevents OB/GYNs like me from intervening when a woman is facing a potentially life-threatening complication of her pregnancy. They do not have to be knocking on death’s door before we can intervene. In fact, I can speak from experience, as I practice in Indiana, which has a very similar law. Madam Vice President: Stop lying to my patients! Your lies are harming women and they’re harming physicians!
On Friday, Francis posted again on the “dangerous lies about abortion drugs” and the claim that “state abortion laws are killing women.”
Georgia’s abortion law, Francis explained,
not only was meant to protect women and children in the state of Georgia, but also is very clear in that doctors can intervene in cases where women are facing potentially life-threatening complications of their pregnancy, or even if they have a chronic medical condition that poses a severe threat to their life or physical health.
Miller, the OB/GYN pointed out, “avoided going to see the doctor with these complications because she had heard the lies about Georgia’s abortion law and was afraid to go to the doctor that she wouldn’t receive the care that she needed, or that she would be prosecuted.”
“There’s not a single state law in this country that prosecutes women who have had abortions,” Francis continued,
and there’s not a single state law in the entire country that prevents doctors like me from intervening to manage complications, especially complications that we see routinely after women take abortion drugs. Candi and Amber, who we heard about yesterday, both suffered severe complications from abortion drugs that potentially led to their death. It’s important for women to understand that these drugs carry inherent risks and the way they’re being dispensed online now, because of the FDA’s reckless actions in removing medical supervision, is especially dangerous. It’s time for these lies to stop. Stop putting a political agenda ahead of women’s health!
The Democrats’ 2024 platform clearly makes the claim that pro-life legislation in the states following the Dobbs decision is putting “the health and lives of women in jeopardy” and places the blame for that ruling on Trump:
“Trump is responsible for the more than twenty state bans that are now in effect as a result,” the platform states:
He has said women should be punished for getting an abortion, and that states should be able to punish doctors who provide them. If he returns to the White House, Trump will ban abortion nationwide. And his allies plan to ban medication abortion nationwide, without Congress or the courts, by enforcing a law from the 1800s, including prosecuting women and doctors for sending or receiving medication abortion in the mail.
In their goal to win the White House and achieve unrestricted abortion, Harris and her allies are making numerous false claims, particularly in states with ballot initiatives regarding abortion in November.
LifeNews Note: Susan Berry writes for CatholicVote, where this column originally appeared.
