US presidential election 2024: Kamala Harris blames Donald Trump policies for woman’s death after delayed abortion treatment

Vice President Kamala Harris said Tuesday that the death of a young Georgia mother who died after waiting 20 hours for a hospital to treat her complications from an abortion pill shows the consequences of Donald Trump’s actions.

Amber Thurman’s death, first reported Monday by ProPublica, occurred just two weeks after Georgia’s strict abortion ban was enacted in 2022 following the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn nationwide abortion rights. Trump appointed three of the justices who made that decision and has repeatedly said he believes states should decide abortion laws.

“This young mother should be alive, raising her son, and pursuing her dream of attending nursing school,” Harris said in a statement. “Women are bleeding out in parking lots, turned away from emergency rooms, losing their ability to ever have children again. Survivors 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.”

Harris brought up Thurman’s “tragic” case just hours later again during a sit-down interview with a trio of journalists from the National Association of Black Journalists. She is likely to continue raising Thurman’s death through Election Day as Democrats try to use the issue of abortion access to motivate women voters. Harris said she wants to restore Roe v. Wade protections if elected president, an unlikely feat that would require a federal law passed with bipartisan support from Congress.

The federal government has determined that dozens of pregnant women have been illegally turned away from emergency rooms, and the number of cases spiked in abortion-ban states like Texas and Missouri, following the Supreme Court’s ruling. An Associated Press report found that women have been left to miscarry in public bathrooms, wait for treatment in their cars or told by doctors to seek care elsewhere. Women have developed infections or lost part of their reproductive system after hospitals in abortion-ban states delayed emergency abortions.

Thurman’s death is the first publicly reported instance of a woman dying from delayed care.

The Trump campaign said on Tuesday that fault rests with the hospital for failing to provide life-saving treatment.

“President Trump has always supported exceptions for rape, incest, and the life of the mother, which Georgia’s law provides,” Trump’s press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in an emailed statement. “With those exceptions in place, it’s unclear why doctors did not swiftly act to protect Amber Thurman’s life.”

Thurman’s case is under review with the state’s maternal mortality commission. The suburban Atlanta hospital that reportedly delayed her treatment has not been cited by the federal government for failing to provide stabilising treatment to a pregnant patient anytime within the last two years, an AP review of federal documents found.

Thurman sought help at the hospital for complications from taking an abortion pill two weeks after Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp signed a law that mostly outlaws abortion and criminalised performing one. Even as Thurman developed sepsis, ProPublica reported, doctors at the hospital did not evacuate the remaining fetal tissue in her uterus with a procedure called a dilation and curettage, or D&C. She died on the operating table, shortly after asking her mother to take care of her 6-year-old son. ProPublica said it will release another report on an abortion-related death in the coming days.

Democrats and abortion rights advocates seized on the report, saying that it proves women’s health is suffering from draconian abortion bans, a point that anti-abortion advocates have rebuffed and discounted as misinformation.

“We actually have the substantiated proof of something we already knew: that abortion bans can kill people,” Mini Timmaraju, president for Reproductive Freedom for All, said Monday.