Former President Donald Trump asserted during his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris that in appointing the Supreme Court Justices that helped overturn Roe v. Wade, Trump had accomplished what “everybody wanted.”
What “everybody wanted,” Trump said, was to give the legislative power over abortion restrictions to the states, removing the protections of the SCOTUS decision that had governed women’s reproductive rights in America for 50 years.
Trump claimed that the move to eradicate Roe was “courageous” — an assertion that appears to contradict his simultaneous claim that his work to end the federal protections took courage, as it takes little courage to do something that is unopposed and which “everybody” wants.
Appealing discreetly to pro-choice advocates, a few of whom he’ll presumably need to win in November, Trump pointed out that once it was on the ballot in various states, the right to abortion survived — even in conservative states like Kansas, ballot initiatives to drastically limit abortion rights failed resoundingly.
But that doesn’t mean that there haven’t been casualties of tighter abortion restrictions where these have been successful on a state level — that is where post-Roe restrictions changed the legal consequences of treating pregnant women.
Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina are enforcing six-week bans.
Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, Arkansas, West Virginia, Kentucky, Missouri, North Dakota, South Dakota, Idaho and Indiana have essentially banned abortion with different levels of exceptions, largely through trigger laws — anti-abortion legislation that pre-dated Roe and never came off the books, and so was therefore “triggered” by the Dobbs decision that scuttled Roe.
Statement from Vice President Harris on new report of a 28-year-old Georgia woman dying after not receiving urgent care needed for an infection under Georgia’s extreme abortion ban https://t.co/sf1yJp3foG pic.twitter.com/kM0pq3qG3K
— Kamala HQ (@KamalaHQ) September 17, 2024
As a result, pro-choice advocates say, caution in the medical community about breaking the new laws has resulted in dangerously dismissive — even derelict — levels of care for pregnant women in numerous instances, especially in states where exceptions are limited or non-existent.
The Kamala Harris presidential campaign is currently sharing an investigative article by the independent journalistic enterprise ProPublica on the dangers such laws pose to pregnant women.
The Harris campaign says: “And now women are dying. These are the consequences of Donald Trump’s actions.”
Sharing the ProPublica report, the Harris campaign writes of a “new report of a 28-year-old Georgia woman dying after not receiving urgent care needed for an infection under Georgia’s extreme abortion ban.”
The article cites the deaths of two pregnant women in Georgia who “have already died after they couldn’t access legal abortions and timely medical care in their state,” focusing on the case of Amber Nicole Thurman.
Thurman died leaving her 6-year-old son behind in a case where she needed an operation that had been deemed a felony only months before she needed it. Thurman was not determined to qualify as one of the “exceptions” allowed until nearly 20 hours after she arrived for the surgery.
The article Harris shared states that Thurman’s case “marks the first time an abortion-related death, officially deemed ‘preventable,’ is coming to public light.” It also grimly speculates: “There are almost certainly others.”