Harris misleading public about abortion deaths in Georgia

Amid her endless vacillations, Kamala Harris has been consistent on one thing: her pro-abortion extremism. As California attorney general, U.S. senator, and vice president, she has both pushed for its expansion and its public financing and antagonized and prosecuted its opponents. So it is not surprising that Harris headed to the swing state of Georgia to take advantage of the firestorm caused by two abortion-related deaths of women in Georgia that the media and other pro-abortion forces are blaming on its heartbeat law. But like her allies, Harris is being deceptive about the cases.

The left-wing, nonprofit journalistic outfit ProPublica, having apparently run out of Supreme Court justices to attempt to drive from public life, has led the charge on this deception. The overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022 returned the task of regulating abortion to the people and to the states, allowing Georgia’s heartbeat law to go into effect. It outlaws abortion once a fetus has a detectable heartbeat (with exceptions for rape, incest, and maternal health).

ProPublica blamed the law for the deaths of two women in the state who had taken chemical-abortion drugs: Amber Nicole Thurman and Candi Miller. Thurman obtained abortion pills in North Carolina, then returned home to Georgia to take them. The pills killed her unborn twins, but did not expel their remains. She sought hospital treatment, but doctors did not remove the remains; Thuman died as a result. Miller, in a similar situation, declined to seek any treatment, and died at home. ProPublica implied that both women’s deaths were the fault of Georgia law: In the former case, doctors did not believe they could operate on Thurman; in the latter, Miller did not believe doctors could operate on her.

The deaths of these women are tragedies, as are the deaths of the children they carried. And they were all the more tragic because, if the reporting is accurate, they were unnecessary. Georgia law does not forbid the surgical removal of an already dead child. No reasonable person who read the plain text of the law would think otherwise, which may be why ProPublica did not include the relevant portion in its report. Even the argument that the doctors’ uncertainty about the law prevented treatment is unsubstantiated. ProPublica admits that “it is not clear” why doctors waited to perform the necessary procedure.

It is perverse to blame abortion bans for deaths that resulted from taking the abortion pill. It is doubly perverse given that the FDA, under the Biden-Harris administration, has eliminated safeguards designed to ensure that women take the pill under a doctor’s guidance. Operating on their own, these women received inadequate care, and the problem was compounded by an apparently inadequate understanding of what care was available under the law.

The pro-abortion forces remain desperate to wipe out any protections for the unborn. For her part, Harris has provided a preview of how she would use the office of the presidency to advance their agenda, and the truth won’t be an obstacle.

In response, pro-lifers must continue to advocate Georgia-like laws, and make it clear that they don’t prevent women from getting emergency care. Authorities in states with pro-life laws on the books should follow Florida’s lead and issue guidance telling doctors that failing to provide life-saving care to pregnant women may constitute malpractice. Pro-abortion advocates have been the ones deliberately obscuring this fact, in the service of rank scaremongering that, if doctors and women believe it, can have dire consequences. If there’s anyone who should have the tragedies in Georgia on their consciences, it is the side of the abortion debate that favors unfettered access to chemical-abortion drugs and seeks to sow confusion about the state of the law.