Another woman killed by Trump abortion ban

Republican bans on abortion are working as intended:

Candi Miller’s health was so fragile, doctors warned having another baby could kill her.

“They said it was going to be more painful and her body may not be able to withstand it,” her sister, Turiya Tomlin-Randall, told ProPublica.

But when the mother of three realized she had unintentionally gotten pregnant in the fall of 2022, Georgia’s new abortion ban gave her no choice. Although it made exceptions for acute, life-threatening emergencies, it didn’t account for chronic conditions, even those known to present lethal risks later in pregnancy.

At 41, Miller had lupus, diabetes and hypertension and didn’t want to wait until the situation became dire. So she avoided doctors and navigated an abortion on her own — a path many health experts feared would increase risks when women in America lost the constitutional right to obtain legal, medically supervised abortions.

Miller ordered abortion pills online, but she did not expel all the fetal tissue and would need a dilation and curettage procedure to clear it from her uterus and stave off sepsis, a grave and painful infection. In many states, this care, known as a D&C, is routine for both abortions and miscarriages. In Georgia, performing it had recently been made a felony, with few exceptions.

Her teenage son watched her suffer for days after she took the pills, bedridden and moaning. In the early hours of Nov. 12, 2022, her husband found her unresponsive in bed, her 3-year-old daughter at her side.

An autopsy found unexpelled fetal tissue, confirming that the abortion had not fully completed. It also found a lethal combination of painkillers, including the dangerous opioid fentanyl. Miller had no history of drug use, the medical records state; her family has no idea how she obtained them or what was going through her mind — whether she was trying to quell the pain, complete the abortion or end her life. A medical examiner was unable to determine the manner of death.

Her family later told a coroner she hadn’t visited a doctor “due to the current legislation on pregnancies and abortions.”

When a state committee of experts in maternal health, including 10 doctors, reviewed her case this year at the end of August, they immediately decided it was “preventable” and blamed the state’s abortion ban, according to members who spoke to ProPublica on the condition of anonymity.

Denying women access to abortion even when pregnancy is seriously threatening to a woman’s health, terrifying women into trying to abort fetuses without medical supervision, terrifying women into not seeking medical care even when the consequences might be fatal, terrifying medical personnel into not performing medical care even when the consequences might be fatal — all of the things Donald Trump wanted to happen when he got Roe v. Wade overruled.

I’m glad Harris is making this an issue:

Kamala Harris is laying the deaths of two Georgia women at the feet of Donald Trump.

During a campaign stop in Atlanta on Friday, an impassioned Harris tied Trump’s appointment of three conservative Supreme Court justices key to overturning Roe v. Wade to the deaths of two women in the state. ProPublica reported this week the women were denied or afraid to seek emergency medical care because of Georgia’s ban on abortions after about six weeks of pregnancy.

The vice president warned what happened in Georgia would become only more common in a second Trump presidency.

“Now we know that at least two women — and those are only the stories we know here in the state of Georgia — died because of a Trump abortion ban,” Harris said. “The reality is, for every story we hear of the suffering under Trump abortion bans, there are so many of the stories we’re not hearing, but where suffering is happening every day in our country.”

This needs to be a constant theme from the campaign, and I think it will be.