Who’s to blame for abortion pill deaths?

In August 2022, Amber Nicole Thurman decided to terminate her twin pregnancy, then at the nine-week mark of gestation. The Georgia resident traveled to North Carolina for a surgical abortion since Georgia’s post-Roe abortion ban had recently gone into effect. According to an investigation of maternal mortality records conducted by ProPublica, Thurman missed her scheduled dilation and curettage (D&C) procedure and opted instead for the available take-home abortion pill regimen, first mifepristone and then misoprostol. She took the pills at home in Georgia over several days. Five days after Thurman began her medical abortion, her boyfriend called 911. She was septic and hemorrhaging. Thurman spent the next 20 hours in the hospital, treated for an acute sepsis infection due to retained tissue, the result of complications from a medication abortion. She died on the operating table.

Abortion advocates like those at ProPublica believe that Georgia’s abortion ban was the cause of Thurman’s death. But her death was the result of five days at home, where she suffered increasingly dangerous complications from medications designed to be taken outside of the care of the doctors who prescribed them. Even if Thurman had remained in North Carolina, the abortion provider’s recommendation was to head to the emergency room if she experienced complications.

ProPublica claims that only 32 patients have died since 2002 as a result of the abortion pill and lists only 11 sepsis cases. Yet nearly 20 percent of women taking medical abortion drugs experience complications, according to reliable data out of Europe. Furthermore, women who die as a result of abortion pill complications are often miscoded as non-abortion-related deaths. Women who take mifepristone to induce abortions are at an elevated risk of developing sepsis. Attorney Mike Seibel, co-founder of the pro-life Abortion on Trial organization, introduced me to the story of New Mexico’s Keisha Akins, whose death due to sepsis caused by mifepristone use was hidden on her medical records. Like Thurman, Akins’ death was listed as a surgical complication.

Neither Keisha Atkins nor Amber Thurman died because they failed to get timely D&Cs administered by triaging physicians. These women died because they were prescribed a dangerous pharmaceutical, mifepristone, and were consequently ignored by their prescribing abortion providers. The New York Times (in an opinion piece ironically titled “It Was Only a Matter of Time Before Abortion Bans Killed Someone”) claims that abortion pills are safer than Viagra or childbirth. But these claims can only be made using the sorry state of abortion pill data in the United States.

There simply isn’t any reliable data on the safety of mifepristone use in America. According to Food and Drug Administration policy, only deaths are reported from the taking of mifepristone. Further, providers are not required to report any adverse events from abortion pill use. Prescribing physicians are ignorant by design of the complications suffered by their patients—abortion providers tell women to seek emergency room care, severing the doctor-patient relationship and any meaningful follow-up.

The abortion industry wants to push the liability for mifepristone use onto triaging physicians, never abortion providers. Physicians living in states with abortion bans need tighter standards of care when evaluating a woman with a possible abortion complication in the emergency department to protect their own liability. There is nothing in Georgia’s law prohibiting treatment for retained products of conception. The physicians treating Thurman should have moved quickly to remove the remains of the aborted baby and administer antibiotics instead of delaying treatment.

Triaging doctors should expect to be targeted and come under misplaced, intense scrutiny that always evades abortion providers. Complications from medication abortions should be quickly and routinely reported to the FDA by treating physicians as a result of mifepristone use, and women should be routinely reminded that they have a right to sue their abortion providers for complications due to the abortion pill regimen.

Women who experience abortion complications are failed only by abortion providers and the abortion pill manufacturer. Abortion advocates want us to believe that medication abortions are safer than Tylenol. But any medication that induces death as its measure of success could never be safe. As the case of Amber Thurman demonstrates, nothing could be further from the truth.

Abortion bans don’t kill women. Abortions do.