TV icon Oprah Winfrey lent her star power to Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris, but sadly their segment on the story of Amber Nicole Thurman shows Harris is anti-science and refuses to take responsibility for the failures of the Biden-Harris Food and Drug Administration’s lax abortion-drug policies, which harm women.
Thurman—whose case Harris also highlighted in a Georgia speech Friday—tragically died, reportedly after the abortion pill mifepristone caused sepsis infection. That’s because the Biden-Harris FDA enabled women to manage risky and traumatic chemical abortions at home alone, without mandated help from medical professionals.
Thurman would likely be alive without the Biden-Harris FDA.
Some liberals blame Georgia’s pro-life limits on abortion for Thurman’s death, but Georgia state law explicitly allows abortions when a mother’s life or physical health is at risk. Indeed, as this Independent Women’s Voice interactive national map shows, abortion is legal in all 50 states—always for the life of the mother, as well as for additional exceptions and time frames.
Thurman underwent a chemical abortion across state lines in North Carolina prior to her arrival in a Georgia emergency room. Sadly, when she arrived at the hospital after her infection, her unborn twins already reportedly showed no heart activity.
That means it was the alleged malpractice of the hospital physicians who failed to properly treat Thurman, whose unborn children were already dead.
Dangerous chemical abortions—known as “the pill”—are now the most common method of terminating a pregnancy. Without proper monitoring, they are a serious threat to women’s health and require greater medical scrutiny.
One notable research study published in the academic journal Obstetrics and Gynecology reported on a longitudinal analysis of more than 40,000 abortions in Finland from 2000 to 2006.
That study found that 1 in 5 women undergoing chemical abortions experienced complications—four times more than the number of women who experienced complications from surgical abortions. The fact that chemical abortions involve less physician supervision than surgical procedures is likely a factor in those increased complications
Dr. Christina Francis, CEO of the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists and a board-certified OB-GYN who has practiced for two decades, said that Thurman’s death “was caused by legal abortion drugs,” as well as medical negligence.
“Amber Thurman’s tragic death, recently covered by multiple news organizations, was caused by side effects of legal abortion drugs and medical negligence, not pro-life laws,” Francis said in a statement.
Dr. Heidi Overton, a medical doctor with a Ph.D. in public health, noted for the America First Policy Institute that prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, elements of the chemical abortion process became remote through a site-to-site protocol from Planned Parenthood and a direct-to-patient protocol in a clinical trial. However, some components of each process still required an in-person visit.
Overton—a White House fellow in 2019-2020 in both the Trump White House’s Office of American Innovation and the Domestic Policy Council who now serves as vice chair of the Center for a Healthy America and chief policy officer at AFPI—noted that early in the pandemic, abortion providers published a protocol for a “no-test medication abortion,” allowing for fully virtual medical appointments (also called “tele-abortion”) for chemical abortions without the need for labs, ultrasound, or a pelvic exam in select states—under the guise of preventing unnecessary COVID-19 exposures for women and doctors.
Though expanded access to telehealth is generally positive, it should occur only in cases in which it is completely safe for patients, and tele-abortion does not meet that standard.
In May 2020, the American Civil Liberties Union, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and other plaintiffs filed a lawsuit seeking to block the in-person dispensing requirement for a chemical abortion. A mere two months later, in July 2020, a federal district court suspended the Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy requirement that mifepristone must be distributed in person, allowing these pills to be distributed by mail for the duration of the pandemic.
The Trump administration appealed that ruling, and the Supreme Court granted a stay on Jan. 12, 2021. Efforts to use COVID-19 to expand abortion-on-demand faced early legal challenges, as Overton notes, but chemical abortion proponents found favor during the Biden-Harris administration.
In April 2021, the Biden-Harris FDA announced temporary enforcement discretion regarding the Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy before it permanently revised the policy in December 2021 to allow chemical abortion without the safeguards of in-person evaluation.
In January 2023, the FDA approved the dispensing of the medication at retail pharmacies after a prescription from an authorized medical provider. That policy serves to facilitate abortion on demand from any setting and removes health safeguards.
The Left claims to support women and to “trust the science,” but the facts around chemical abortion tell a different story.
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