Amber Thurman and Candi Miller should still be alive

Two Georgia women have now died as a result of the state's abortion ban. Thurman, who was just 28, used her final words to ask her mom to take care of her 6-year-old son.

“Promise me you’ll take care of my son,” Amber Thurman reportedly asked her mother before she was wheeled into surgery in an Atlanta-area hospital with a deadly septic infection in her uterus. Those were her last words.

Thurman, 28, and Candi Miller, a 41-year-old mom of three with lupus, diabetes and hypertension, are the first two official “preventable” deaths as a result of abortion bans that have come to light since the Supreme Court overturned Roe, according to horrific new reporting by ProPublica. Thurman learned she had become pregnant with twins in July 2022. She was already a struggling single mom, had just enrolled in nursing school to try and get her finances on track, and couldn’t afford two more babies at the time. But just as she discovered she was already six weeks along—which is quite early, as pregnancy weeks are counted from your last period—Georgia Republicans passed a six-week ban on abortion, effectively shutting off her options. She had to drive to North Carolina to obtain abortion pills, but she was already back in Georgia by the time she started experiencing complications, became septic, and started vomiting blood. And her local hospital, spooked by the state’s new abortion ban, delayed the emergency D&C care she needed to the point where she essentially died waiting for it.

Several months later, Miller suffered a similar tragedy. She became pregnant with her fourth child at age 41, amid several preexisting health conditions. She took her matters into her own hands due to Georgia’s recent abortion ban and ordered pills online—a modern “back-alley” abortion of the kind that necessitated Roe v. Wade in the first place. When Miller’s body did not expel the fetal tissue properly, she was in so much pain that she took a cocktail of painkillers at home—despite having no history of drug use—and died four days later with her 3-year-old daughter by her side.

These horrifying and entirely preventable deaths amount to systemic state violence. Killing women is a policy choice. And while ProPublica has only yet managed to unearth these two incidents in Georgia, there are almost certainly more like them across the country that only haven’t been officially acknowledged as “abortion-related” in state documents. Kamala Harris has changed her schedule last minute and will travel back to Atlanta tomorrow to talk about Amber and Candi and pin their deaths on Donald Trump and the Republican Party, which is absolutely what she should do. Meanwhile, some self-described “pro-life” leaders who claim to be Christians are openly celebrating Black women dying and wishing they’d suffered more, which goes a long way toward explaining what kind of sociopaths are actually behind the wheel of the anti-abortion movement:

I am quite sure that Jesus would expeditiously distance himself from Lizzie Marbach and her ilk.

In other news…

• Mark Robinson, the Trump-endorsed Republican candidate for governor in North Carolina, once described himself as a “black Nazi” on a porn message board, called for reinstating slavery, and described himself as a “perv,” CNN reported this afternoon. Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.) responded to the bombshell news with a simple “not good,” while Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.)—who’s done literal campaign events with Robinson for years—claimed she “hasn’t followed him closely.” Trump once called Robinson “Martin Luther King on steroids,” which the Harris campaign was quick to point out

• Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) is so panicked about Trump slipping in the polls that he is out in Lincoln, Nebraska, today—which he does not represent!—trying to convince Republicans to change the state’s electoral rules at the 11th hour to a “winner-takes-all” situation, which would deny Harris an electoral vote in November. (This is basically cheating)

• On a much lighter note, I’m obsessed with the 8-year-old girl in Ohio who stole her parents’ car, drove 30 minutes to Target to go shopping, hit a mailbox on the way, and was found sipping a frappuccino when the police arrived

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