Last month, one of Georgia’s two U.S. senators, Democrat Jon Ossoff, conducted a hearing in Decatur on the impact of Georgia’s current anti-abortion law. The hearing produced gut-wrenching testimony from two women who suffered gruesome miscarriages after being denied abortions.
In the following days, the nonprofit media outlet ProPublica broke stories about two other Georgia women who died, what were later judged to be “preventable” deaths, after not being able to access much-needed medical care.
One of the witnesses at the Ossoff hearing was Mackenzie Kulik, described in AJC political columnist Patricia Murphy’s report as a married medical researcher whose much-wanted pregnancy went disastrously wrong. Medical tests found that the child was missing her face and that her lungs would never function.
But under Georgia’s ironically named LIFE Act, she couldn’t be given an abortion in Georgia and wound up going to Washington, D.C., where, Murphy reported, she found herself in so much pain that she had to lie down on a sidewalk and wait for an Uber to take her to a clinic. “I felt like an animal,” she told the Ossoff hearing. “Like I didn’t matter, like my baby didn’t matter.”
The ProPublica stories detailed the previously unreported cases of Amber Nicole Thurman and Candi Miller. Both women suffered doomed pregnancies but couldn’t get abortions in Georgia and wound up taking abortion medication. Thurman, a 28-year-old medical assistant, sought a dilation and curettage (D&C) procedure to remove remaining fetal tissue from her uterus, but wound up having to wait 20 hours while doctors monitored her condition. Under current Georgia law, even performing a D&C can be a felony, and physicians committing such a felony can be sentenced to 10 years in prison.
On the evening of Aug. 18, according to ProPublica, Thurman had passed out at home after vomiting blood and was rushed to Piedmont Henry Hospital in Stockbridge. Early the next morning, an obstetrician diagnosed “acute severe sepsis,” but it would be more than eight additional hours before she was taken into an operating room. By then it was too late. She died on the operating table.
Candi Miller’s case was different. She suffered from pre-existing medical conditions—lupus, diabetes and hypertension—that virtually guaranteed that any pregnancy would be difficult at best. According to ProPublica, doctors had told her that having another baby could kill her. Already a mother of three, she became unintentionally pregnant in the fall of 2022, after the U.S. Supreme Court’s reversal of the 50-year-old Roe v Wade protections had cleared the way for Georgia’s new eight-week heartbeat law to become effective. Her family would later tell a coroner that she hadn’t sought the help of a physician “due to the current legislation on pregnancies and abortions.”
Instead, she ordered abortion pills online but didn’t expel all the fetal tissue and, like Thurman, needed a D&C procedure to clear it. She apparently never sought the procedure. “Her teenage son watched her suffer for days after she took the pills, bedridden and moaning,” ProPublica reported. “In the early hours of Nov. 12, 2022, her husband found her unresponsive in bed, her 3-year-old daughter at her side.”
A state committee that reviews maternal deaths investigated both the Thurman and Miller deaths and found they were “preventable,” according to ProPublica. In Miller’s case, one committee member told ProPublica: “The fact that she felt she had to make these decisions, that she didn’t have adequate choices here in Georgia, we felt that definitely influenced her case. She’s absolutely responding to this legislation.”
For Gov. Brian Kemp and his Republican allies, the abortion revelations came at a spectacularly bad time—not only just weeks ahead of the 2024 presidential election in which abortion is already a central issue, but barely two weeks after the deadliest school shooting in state history. On Sept. 4, a 14-year-old boy named Colt Gray walked into Apalachee High School in Barrow County with an AR-15-style rifle and allegedly gunned down two teachers and two students and wounded nine more students.
Thus have two of Kemp’s keystone issues—expanding gun rights and limiting abortion rights—been thrust into both statewide and national media spotlights in a single month, with tragic consequences. Six people are dead.
His first campaign for governor used a supposedly humorous television ad of him aiming a shotgun at a young man who wanted to date one of his daughters. In 2022, “Governor Shotgun,” as he came to be known, delivered on a campaign promise and signed into law a bill allowing anyone who can afford to buy a gun to carry it, concealed, without a permit.
When his anti-abortion heartbeat bill went into effect, Kemp declared that he was “overjoyed” and felt the state had hit on a policy framework that would keep women “safe, healthy and informed.”
At the Apalachee High School press conference, a reporter asked Kemp whether there was anything more his office might have done to prevent the shootings. He tap-danced around the question with an old talking point. “Look,” he said, “we’ve done a tremendous amount on school safety, but today is not the day for politics or policy.”
As I write this, Kemp himself has not responded to either the Ossoff committee testimony or the ProPublica stories, but it seems a fair guess he might attempt the same “not the day for politics” two-step around the issue. It also seems a fair guess that Amber Nicole Thurman and Candi Miller would probably disagree. So might Apalachee High math teachers Richard Aspinwall and Cristina Irimie and students Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo. Sadly, they no longer get a vote.
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Are Guns and Abortion Coming Back to Haunt Gov. Brian Kemp?
Last month, one of Georgia’s two U.S. senators, Democrat Jon Ossoff, conducted a hearing in Decatur on the impact of Georgia’s current anti-abortion law. The hearing produced gut-wrenching testimony from two women who suffered gruesome miscarriages after being denied abortions.
In the following days, the nonprofit media outlet ProPublica broke stories about two other Georgia women who died, what were later judged to be “preventable” deaths, after not being able to access much-needed medical care.
One of the witnesses at the Ossoff hearing was Mackenzie Kulik, described in AJC political columnist Patricia Murphy’s report as a married medical researcher whose much-wanted pregnancy went disastrously wrong. Medical tests found that the child was missing her face and that her lungs would never function.
But under Georgia’s ironically named LIFE Act, she couldn’t be given an abortion in Georgia and wound up going to Washington, D.C., where, Murphy reported, she found herself in so much pain that she had to lie down on a sidewalk and wait for an Uber to take her to a clinic. “I felt like an animal,” she told the Ossoff hearing. “Like I didn’t matter, like my baby didn’t matter.”
The ProPublica stories detailed the previously unreported cases of Amber Nicole Thurman and Candi Miller. Both women suffered doomed pregnancies but couldn’t get abortions in Georgia and wound up taking abortion medication. Thurman, a 28-year-old medical assistant, sought a dilation and curettage (D&C) procedure to remove remaining fetal tissue from her uterus, but wound up having to wait 20 hours while doctors monitored her condition. Under current Georgia law, even performing a D&C can be a felony, and physicians committing such a felony can be sentenced to 10 years in prison.
On the evening of Aug. 18, according to ProPublica, Thurman had passed out at home after vomiting blood and was rushed to Piedmont Henry Hospital in Stockbridge. Early the next morning, an obstetrician diagnosed “acute severe sepsis,” but it would be more than eight additional hours before she was taken into an operating room. By then it was too late. She died on the operating table.
Candi Miller’s case was different. She suffered from pre-existing medical conditions—lupus, diabetes and hypertension—that virtually guaranteed that any pregnancy would be difficult at best. According to ProPublica, doctors had told her that having another baby could kill her. Already a mother of three, she became unintentionally pregnant in the fall of 2022, after the U.S. Supreme Court’s reversal of the 50-year-old Roe v Wade protections had cleared the way for Georgia’s new eight-week heartbeat law to become effective. Her family would later tell a coroner that she hadn’t sought the help of a physician “due to the current legislation on pregnancies and abortions.”
Instead, she ordered abortion pills online but didn’t expel all the fetal tissue and, like Thurman, needed a D&C procedure to clear it. She apparently never sought the procedure. “Her teenage son watched her suffer for days after she took the pills, bedridden and moaning,” ProPublica reported. “In the early hours of Nov. 12, 2022, her husband found her unresponsive in bed, her 3-year-old daughter at her side.”
A state committee that reviews maternal deaths investigated both the Thurman and Miller deaths and found they were “preventable,” according to ProPublica. In Miller’s case, one committee member told ProPublica: “The fact that she felt she had to make these decisions, that she didn’t have adequate choices here in Georgia, we felt that definitely influenced her case. She’s absolutely responding to this legislation.”
For Gov. Brian Kemp and his Republican allies, the abortion revelations came at a spectacularly bad time—not only just weeks ahead of the 2024 presidential election in which abortion is already a central issue, but barely two weeks after the deadliest school shooting in state history. On Sept. 4, a 14-year-old boy named Colt Gray walked into Apalachee High School in Barrow County with an AR-15-style rifle and allegedly gunned down two teachers and two students and wounded nine more students.
Thus have two of Kemp’s keystone issues—expanding gun rights and limiting abortion rights—been thrust into both statewide and national media spotlights in a single month, with tragic consequences. Six people are dead.
His first campaign for governor used a supposedly humorous television ad of him aiming a shotgun at a young man who wanted to date one of his daughters. In 2022, “Governor Shotgun,” as he came to be known, delivered on a campaign promise and signed into law a bill allowing anyone who can afford to buy a gun to carry it, concealed, without a permit.
When his anti-abortion heartbeat bill went into effect, Kemp declared that he was “overjoyed” and felt the state had hit on a policy framework that would keep women “safe, healthy and informed.”
At the Apalachee High School press conference, a reporter asked Kemp whether there was anything more his office might have done to prevent the shootings. He tap-danced around the question with an old talking point. “Look,” he said, “we’ve done a tremendous amount on school safety, but today is not the day for politics or policy.”
As I write this, Kemp himself has not responded to either the Ossoff committee testimony or the ProPublica stories, but it seems a fair guess he might attempt the same “not the day for politics” two-step around the issue. It also seems a fair guess that Amber Nicole Thurman and Candi Miller would probably disagree. So might Apalachee High math teachers Richard Aspinwall and Cristina Irimie and students Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo. Sadly, they no longer get a vote.
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