Vice President Kamala Harris will deliver an address in Georgia blaming former President Donald Trump for two deaths in Georgia that, she will claim, were due to the state’s abortion laws, but where the causal links are dubious.
Georgia has banned abortions after six weeks of pregnancy. The New York Times reported Wednesday that Harris intends to give a speech based on claims by ProPublica, a liberal outlet, that the law caused the deaths of two women.
The Times said:
Vice President Kamala Harris will give remarks in Atlanta on Friday focused on the stories of two Georgia mothers whose deaths she has argued show the consequences of the strict abortion bans passed by Republicans after Roe v. Wade was overturned.
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The deaths, reported this week by ProPublica, occurred in the months after Georgia passed a law banning abortion at six weeks. Amber Thurman died of sepsis resulting from an incomplete medication abortion after waiting 20 hours in a suburban Atlanta hospital for medical care. A second woman, Candi Miller, died after declining to seek medical care for complications from abortion medication.
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In her remarks on Friday, Ms. Harris will call for restoring federal abortion rights and cite the women’s deaths as illustrating the devastating impacts of what she calls “Trump Abortion Bans,” according to the person with knowledge of her remarks.
Trump has not advocated for banning abortion at the state level. The restrictions that some conservative states have passed have been accompanied by — indeed, were often preceded by — broad new laws in liberal states guaranteeing abortion up to the moment of birth.
Moreover, the two cases Harris has highlighted on the campaign trail, and that she will discuss on Friday, are both dubious, and both from the same publication, ProPublica.
As Breitbart News’ Katherine Hamilton noted Wednesday, ProPublica linked Amber Thurman’s death to the new law without any clear evidence for doing so. Thurman presented at the hospital after taking abortion bills and acquiring an infection due to remnants of fetal tissue in her uterus. Doctors delayed performing a procedure called dilation and curettage (D&C).
ProPublica claimed the delay was caused by reluctance to risk running afoul of the new abortion law, but admitted later in the article that “it is not clear from the records available” whether that was the reason.
As Hamilton pointed out: “Every abortion restriction in the United States notably contains exceptions for extreme medical emergencies and the life of the mother, and courts have ruled that these laws do not require “imminence” or “certainty” before a doctor can act to save a patient’s life.” She added that ProPublica “omitted key parts of the law, which reveal that treating Thurman for sepsis after an incomplete medication abortion was well-covered by state law.
In the second case, Candi Miller “avoided doctors and navigated an abortion on her own,” ProPublica admits. She took abortion pills, but unlike Thurman, did not do so under medical supervision. (She would have been able to have a D&C if she had been properly treated by doctors who were aware that she had a life-threatening complication.) An autopsy also found “a lethal combination of painkillers, including the dangerous opioid fentanyl,” ProPublica says.
A state committee report found that Miller’s death was “preventable,” ProPublica says, but when the publication says that the committee blamed the Georgia abortion law, it cites anonymous members of the committee who give their own opinions, not the summary of the committee report, which ProPublica says it has obtained but has not released.
Debate continues about the effect of abortion restrictions on women’s health. (Abortion services have also been deadly in some cases, as in the case of Kermit Gosnell, who was convicted of murder in 2013 for his practices.)
Some argue that women will be at greater risk in states with more stringent abortion restrictions. But the cases that Kamala Harris will cite are not clear examples, and her attempt to tie them to Trump is contradicted by his actual policy.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days, available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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