ProPublica’s Misleading Abortion Ban Stories Are Part of the Problem

(Bob Andres/Atlanta Journal-Constitution via AP)

ProPublica is using a pair of tragedies to advance a misleading political narrative about the restrictions Georgia has imposed on abortion.

After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in the summer of 2022, a 2019 bill signed into law by Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) outlawing abortion once a fetus has a detectable heartbeat — with exceptions for rape, incest, and the health of the mother — took effect.

In a pair of recent articles, ProPublica blames the death of two Georgia women on this bill. The facts it marshaled in each tell different stories.

Amber Nicole Thurman died in August 2022 after taking abortion pills. They succeeded in ending the life of the unborn twins growing inside of her, but did not expel the remains.

She sought follow-up care at Piedmont Henry Hospital in Stockbridge, Georgia to have the remains removed from her uterus. Here’s how ProPublica described what happened in the opening paragraphs of its story, under the headline “Abortion Bans Have Delayed Emergency Medical Care. In Georgia, Experts Say This Mother’s Death Was Preventable”:

She’d taken abortion pills and encountered a rare complication; she had not expelled all of the fetal tissue from her body. She showed up at Piedmont Henry Hospital in need of a routine procedure to clear it from her uterus, called a dilation and curettage, or D&C.

But just that summer, her state had made performing the procedure a felony, with few exceptions. Any doctor who violated the new Georgia law could be prosecuted and face up to a decade in prison.

Thurman waited in pain in a hospital bed, worried about what would happen to her 6-year-old son, as doctors monitored her infection spreading, her blood pressure sinking and her organs beginning to fail.

It took 20 hours for doctors to finally operate. By then, it was too late.

The otherwise healthy 28-year-old medical assistant, who had her sights set on nursing school, should not have died, an official state committee recently concluded.

Tasked with examining pregnancy-related deaths to improve maternal health, the experts, including 10 doctors, deemed hers “preventable” and said the hospital’s delay in performing the critical procedure had a “large” impact on her fatal outcome.

There is at least one key factual error in this excerpt: Dilation and curettage is not “a felony” in Georgia. Performing (not obtaining) an abortion — which the state defines as “the act of using, prescribing, or administering any instrument, substance, device, or other means with the purpose to terminate a pregnancy with knowledge that termination will, with reasonable likelihood, cause the death of an unborn child” — after a heartbeat is detectable is a felony, outside of the exceptions outlined above. Georgia law make it plain that “any such act shall not be considered an abortion if the act is performed with the purpose of removing a dead unborn child caused by spontaneous abortion [miscarriage].”

ProPublica suggests that that last bit — “caused by spontaneous abortion” — raises questions over whether it was legal to remove the remains of Thurman’s unborn children, but this is sophistry. The fetus had already expired, so there was no legal barrier to performing a dilation and curettage to remove the remains. No reasonable reading of the law could lead one to believe otherwise.

So it is possible that hospital staff’s misunderstanding of the law — which even in the case of an abortion, grants physicians the ability to perform an abortion if they determine “in reasonable medical judgment, that a medical emergency exists” — led to a delay in Thurman’s care, even if the law itself did not. But there’s not even enough in the article to prove that much.

It’s not until you’re close to sixty paragraphs in that the outlet admits to this absolutely critical fact: “It is not clear from the records available why doctors waited to provide a D&C to Thurman, though the summary report shows they discussed the procedure at least twice in the hours before they finally did.”

To sum it all up: Pills that Planned Parenthood deems “safe and effective” created a medical emergency. Physicians were then slow to provide treatment. ProPublica suggests this was because of doctors’ misinterpretation of Georgia’s abortion law, but admits deep into the piece that it does not actually have any evidence to support that theory.

In a second article published on Wednesday, ProPublica blamed Georgia’s restrictions on abortion for the death of another woman, Candi Miller, in the fall of 2022.

Like Thurman, Miller used abortion pills to seek to terminate her pregnancy. And like Thurman, the pills did not work as intended, failing to expel all of the dead fetus.

Per ProPublica, Miller and her doctors feared that the 41-year-old’s pregnancy could be difficult and potentially dangerous due to her struggles with lupus, diabetes, and hypertension. After she took the pills, she found herself “in excruciating pain” for a few days. Her husband found her unresponsive in her bed and an autopsy found many painkillers, including fentanyl, in her system.

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

There are a couple of vitally important facts to note on this point. Assuming that Miller’s unborn child had a heartbeat — her family says they’re not sure how many weeks she had been with child when she died —  it is true that she would not have been able to seek a surgical abortion. But for the same reasons outlined above, she would have been legally allowed to seek treatment at a hospital for the remains that the pills sold to her failed to expel. ProPublica again erroneously states that Georgia had made a felony out of the dilation and curettage procedure, but Miller was legally entitled to seek such treatment.

Moreover, she could have shown up at the hospital post-abortion without fear of legal penalty. As both pro-life commentator David French and Planned Parenthood have acknowledged, Georgia law does not threaten the liberty of a woman who obtains an abortion.

Once again, it was definitively not Georgia’s abortion law that caused this medical emergency, even if a misinterpretation of it may have factored in.

Good-hearted people disagree mightily about what abortion law should look like in the United States. Now, that the legal folly of Roe has been done away with, those good-hearted debates can be had and the democratic process can play out.

But those debates should be had honestly, not just so the public can reach a well-informed consensus, but to head off the kind of confusion that may have led to the tragic deaths of Amber Nicole Thurman and Candi Miller.

If ProPublica cannot control its ideological impulses — the author of both pieces explains that you should “trust” her reporting because she understands “how abortion bans have made pregnancy more dangerous in America” and “written about the Republican lawmakers who refused to listen” — it should recuse itself from the subject entirely.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.