Family of First Person Killed by State Abortion Ban Speaks Out at Harris Town Hall

The family of the first known person to have died due to a post-Roe abortion ban spoke publicly for the first time on Thursday night, alongside Democratic candidate for president Kamala Harris and famed television host Oprah Winfrey during a town hall event.

They shared the story about their daughter, Amber Nicole Thurman, whose 2022 death was entirely preventable.

Georgia's extreme ban on abortion allows exceptions to save a pregnant person's life, but such exceptions are rarely carried out due to the vagueness of the law failing to stipulate what constitutes a life-saving event (this is a regularly occurring problem throughout the U.S. where such bans are in place). Thurman waited 20 hours before receiving treatment -- had she been treated earlier, it's believed she would have lived.

Said Thurman's mother at the event:

Initially, I did not want the public to know my pain. I wanted to go through in silence, but I realized that it was selfish. I want you to know, Amber was not a statistic, she was loved by a family, a strong family.

It's unclear how many people have died because of such bans that right-wing states have instituted since the dismantling of Roe. While another death is known, such statistics aren't regularly posted, and the number who have perished because of these bans is believed to be much, much higher.

These abortion bans would not have been possible were it not for Donald Trump appointing three anti-abortion justices to the Supreme Court during his tenure in the White House. The overturning of Roe v. Wade, seen by many legal experts as extremely dubious legal reasoning, is directly responsible for Thurman's death, and for the deaths of others, not to mention the detrimental health outcomes many more have experienced.

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