The Deaths and Agonies of Trump’s Abortion Bans
Whatever happened, it’s not their fault. The anti-abortion lawmakers and activists of America insist that their “pro-life” laws aren’t responsible for the suffering that women have experienced in hospitals and clinics across the country in the 26 months since Roe v. Wade was overturned. And in refusing responsibility for this wave of physical and emotional agony, and even death, the anti-abortion movement is also trying to absolve Donald Trump of his role in this catastrophe.
As the evidence mounts, much of the right has been forced to acknowledge that women have been harmed since the Dobbs decision. But instead of admitting that abortion is part of essential medical care, the move has been to point the finger, variously, at pro-choice activists, the media, and doctors themselves, claiming there’s been a coincidental sudden rise in malpractice. In September, after ProPublica reported on the cases of two Georgia women who died after being unable to get legal abortion care in their home state, a spokesman for Governor Brian Kemp blamed “partisan activists and so-called journalists” for “egregious misinformation and propaganda that fostered a culture of fear and confusion.” Later that month, the vice-president of the influential Charlotte Lozier Institute, which styles itself as the data arm of the anti-abortion movement, faulted the abortion pills the two women in Georgia women had taken rather than the abortion ban that had pushed them out of state or online to end their pregnancies, complicating their follow-up care. In late October, without identifying any specific cases, conservative medical groups issued what they called a Women’s Healthcare Declaration, claiming that “life-affirming legislation has been deliberately mischaracterized, leading to confusion and incorrect information among healthcare professionals and patients.”
But the truth, for those who actually want to see it, is plain. As the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists put it in a statement last month: “There is no doubt that abortion bans are preventing ob-gyns and other clinicians from providing health care to their patients, and that those patients and their families are suffering as a result.”
Donald Trump promised to appoint Supreme Court justices who would “automatically” overturn Roe v. Wade, and it’s a rare promise that he kept. Without his three justices, the 6-3 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization — allowing states to ban abortion at any time without mandating any exceptions — could not have happened. Although the number has fluctuated as voters and courts have their say, 13 states currently have total abortion bans with vague or narrow exceptions. A doctor found to have violated these bans can face anything from a loss of license to, in Texas, life in prison.
Now, in many ban states, simply being pregnant and showing up for urgent medical care makes you an undesirable patient, “radioactive to emergency departments,” as one expert put it this spring. Across the United States, anti-abortion activists have zealously fought against attempts to clarify or expand the health exceptions to abortion bans, suggesting that the narrowness and ambiguity of what is allowed is intentional.
Through reporting and litigation, we are beginning to get a partial picture of the harm. Partial because there are lags in official reporting data, and partial because patients and doctors fear prosecution and stigma for sharing their stories. Partial as well because the greatest harms are likely falling on the least visible people in our society. But we know that at least four women have died, that dozens have suffered from severe physical harm, and that there are likely hundreds more.
Defenders of the bans say that the laws simply require that a doctor recognize “two patients”— the pregnant woman and the fetus — rather than one. In practice, however, pregnant women are being refused basic medical care, autonomy, and even, in some cases, freedom of movement. These laws have been forcing women to wait out their own physical decline even when there is no fetal heartbeat (as in the case of one of the women in Georgia) or no chance of a live birth.
In 2016, at a town hall, Trump was asked whether women who get abortions should be punished if the procedure were to become illegal. “The answer is there has to be some form of punishment,” he said. The laws resulting from his decisions have come to punish not only those who want to end their pregnancies but also people who require care for miscarriages and stillbirths. The luckiest — “luckiest” — women who have wanted or needed to end their pregnancies in abortion-ban states since Dobbs have been able to travel elsewhere, scraping together the funds and managing the disruptions at work and home, including caring for any children they already have. They’ve driven for hours through the night or gotten on planes. They’ve ordered pills online — sometimes legally, sometimes outside the law. An untold number have stayed pregnant, such as 12-year-old rape victim Ashley, who gave birth in Mississippi in the fall of 2023. She could have qualified for an exception to the state’s abortion ban, but the process to obtain one was not clear — there may not even be a formal process — and an abortion in Chicago was too far and too expensive.
This fall, Trump has campaigned as the “protector” of women. In September, he said, “As president, I have to be your protector,” and added that women “will be happy, healthy, confident and free. You will no longer be thinking about abortion.” In reality, a second Trump term would open the door to much more sweeping restrictions on abortion, this time on a national level.
Pregnancy, in all its medical complexity, rarely offers binary decisions, and in a state where abortion is illegal, tracing what might have been is even harder. But what we do know is wretched. Here is a partial accounting of the damage Trump has wrought.
Texas was the first front: The Supreme Court allowed the state’s six-week abortion ban, with its vague exception for “medical emergency,” to go into effect on September 1, 2021. According to reporting by ProPublica, Josseli Barnica went to the hospital with cramps the next day. She was 17 weeks and four days pregnant. The day after that, she returned to the hospital bleeding, clearly miscarrying. She told her husband that her doctors said it would be a crime to perform the abortion she needed. She died of sepsis caused by a preventable infection.
At the end of that first September, when Kiersten Hogan was 19 weeks pregnant, her water broke. According to the complaint she later joined against the state, Hogan was detained against her will in the hospital: She was told that as long as a fetal heartbeat was detectable, she would be kept there, on bedrest, until she either began contractions or became sick enough to qualify for an abortion. She said hospital employees told her “that if she tried to leave the hospital it would be used as evidence that she was trying to kill her baby; that if she tried to do anything to end her pregnancy, criminal charges could be brought against her.” Four days into her hospital detention, Hogan had a stillbirth in the bathroom.
The following spring, on May 10, 2022, Texan Elizabeth Weller was 19 weeks pregnant when her water broke — too soon for the fetus to survive. She and her husband opted to terminate rather than wait for Weller to get sicker. After a day spent arguing with hospital authorities, Weller told NPR, her OB/GYN wept as she told her, “They’re not going to touch you.” Weller was directed to wait to get sicker, for the fluid she was passing to darken and become so foul it would make her want to retch. She did, and she returned to the hospital with a sample in a Ziplock bag for evidence. Four days into her ordeal, she received permission to finally be induced and give birth to a stillborn daughter.
On August 2, 2022, Missouri resident Mylissa Farmer was told by doctors in both her home state and Kansas that her uterus had drained of amniotic fluid and her fetus would not survive, but that because there was still a heartbeat, and her life wasn’t yet threatened, they could not help her. According to a suit Farmer filed, a doctor at the University of Kansas hospital initially offered to induce labor, but later returned to say her medical judgment had been overridden and deemed “risky” in the “political” environment. Farmer was forced to travel to Illinois for an abortion.
In the summer of 2022, 28-year-old medical assistant Amber Thurman hoped to get an abortion at home in Georgia. But in July, thanks to the Dobbs decision, a state court allowed a 2019 abortion ban to go into effect. On August 13, ProPublica reported, Thurman traveled to North Carolina to obtain a legal abortion. The clinic she went to was swamped with out-of-state patients, and though she had preferred an in-office procedure, she arrived too late for her appointment and was sent home with pills. Five days later, she was brought by ambulance to Piedmont Henry Hospital in Stockbridge; she had vomited blood and passed out. Doctors at Piedmont twice discussed that Thurman needed a dilatation and curettage procedure to remove tissue that was causing an infection and that there was no longer a fetal heartbeat, meaning there should have been no legal impediment to saving her life. Nonetheless, she was allowed to deteriorate untreated for 17 hours. When she was finally given the surgery, it was too late, and her heart stopped. Thurman’s last words to her mother had been, “Promise me you’ll take care of my son.” A report by Georgia’s maternal-mortality review committee deemed Thurman’s death preventable.
Later that same month, on August 23, Austin, Texas, resident Amanda Zurawksi’s water broke at 17 weeks, well before viability. Doctors told her to go home and monitor herself for infection; infection came, eventually sending her into septic shock and putting her in the ICU for three days. The resulting scar tissue permanently closed one of her fallopian tubes.
The next month, front-desk staff at Sacred Heart Emergency Center in Houston refused to admit a pregnant woman in distress. She was forced to miscarry in a restroom toilet in the hospital’s lobby as her husband called 911.
In the fall of 2022, Candi Miller, a mother of three in Georgia, realized she was pregnant. She had been previously told that with her lupus, hypertension, and diabetes, another pregnancy could kill her. In November 2022, Miller took abortion pills she’d ordered online, which failed to completely expel all pregnancy tissue. Her son later said she was too afraid to seek follow-up care for an apparent infection because she believed she could be prosecuted. A few painful days later, ProPublica reported, “her husband found her unresponsive in bed, her 3-year-old daughter at her side.” Although a medical examiner was unable to definitively say what caused Miller’s death — she had also taken painkillers — the state’s maternal-mortality review deemed Miller’s death preventable and, in interviews, directly blamed Georgia’s abortion ban.
In February 2023, ER doctors in Texas told Kyleigh Thurman to “let nature take its course,” denying her treatment for an ectopic pregnancy, which is never viable. It took four visits to ERs and her OB/GYN begging with the hospital for help for Thurman to be treated, but it was too late to prevent the ectopic pregnancy from rupturing. She survived, but her right fallopian tube had to be removed, endangering her future fertility.
In March 2023, Oklahoman Jaci Statton was diagnosed with a cancerous molar pregnancy, an abnormal cell growth that would never result in a live birth. Medical staff told her, in her recollection, “We cannot touch you unless you are crashing in front of us or your blood pressure goes so high that you are fixing to have a heart attack.” She was bounced between three different hospitals in Oklahoma until finally getting an abortion three hours away in Kansas.
In April 2023, Kristen Anaya was already showing signs of infection when she went to the hospital in Texas miscarrying at 16 and a half weeks, but her fetus, which she and her husband had named Tylee, still had a heartbeat. It took 22 hours for doctors to get permission from administrators to end her pregnancy, even as she got sicker and sicker. She spent five days in the hospital. She recalled, “My husband and I are being told that ‘not only did we lose Tylee, but now you’re gonna go into sepsis and there’s nothing we can do about it other than watch you because of the abortion laws in Texas.’”
Due to life-threatening chronic medical conditions, Cristina Nuñez was advised to never become pregnant. In June 2023, after trying in vain to leave Texas for an abortion, her arm turned black from blood clots, and emergency-room doctors in Texas refused to terminate. Eleven days later, after herculean effort from Nuñez — who faced a language barrier — and advocates, she finally got an abortion at a different hospital under the medical exception.
In October 2023, in Texas, Nevaeh Crain, 18 years old and six months pregnant, made three separate visits to hospitals seeking care for what turned out to be a miscarriage and sepsis. On her third visit, when she was critically ill, doctors delayed her emergency care by ordering a second ultrasound to potentially comply with Texas’s abortion ban. Crain was dead within hours. Her mother told Good Morning America: “I felt like the doctors were more concerned about the baby than her life.”
Texan Kylie Beaton was forced to continue her pregnancy an additional 15 weeks after doctors found that her fetus had a rare and likely lethal brain disorder. “To have a woman go through so much torture along the way, that’s going to stay with them forever,” Beaton told ABC News. Because of the delay, she needed to have a cesarean — riskier than an abortion procedure — because the baby’s head had expanded too much from the condition.
In March 2023, Samantha Casiano, a resident of East Texas and a mother of four, was told her fetus had a condition incompatible with life. Casiano could not afford to travel to New Mexico or Arizona for an abortion, so four months later she was forced to give birth to a baby who lived for four hours. When she testified in court about what she’d gone through, she vomited on the stand.
At the end of October, Trump told a rally audience that he’d gotten pushback from his advisors on all his talk about protecting women. “I said, ‘Well, I’m going to do it whether the women like it or not,’” Trump said. “I am going to protect them.”