Knees meet knees
2024-09-19 08:15:36 UTC
Updated at 3:20 p.m. ET on September 18, 2024
Some tragedies are impossible to prevent, or even to predict. The death of Amber Nicole Thurman was not. She was perhaps the first woman killed by the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
In June 2022, the Supreme Court ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Womenâs Health Organization removed the constitutional right to an abortion guaranteed by Roe. As a result, individual states reverted to their own laws. In Georgia, where Thurman lived, abortions became illegal from the time when a âdetectable human heartbeatâ was presentâaround six weeks into pregnancy. The law came into effect in late July of that year, at the same time that Thurman, a 28-year-old medical assistant, discovered that she was six weeks pregnant with twins.
Thanks to ProPublica, which obtained Thurmanâs medical records with her familyâs permission, we can see what happened next. She already had a 6-year-old son, and decided that she could not raise two more children. But she couldnât get a termination in her home state. And so she scheduled a surgical abortion in North Carolina, took a day off work, hired a babysitter, borrowed a relativeâs car on a false pretext, and got up at 4 a.m. to drive four hours with a friend to the clinic. But they hit traffic, and Thurman missed her appointment. The clinic could not give her another time slot, because so many women from out of state, also facing tough new laws, were booked on that day.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/09/women-killed-dobbs-decision-abortion/679921/
Some tragedies are impossible to prevent, or even to predict. The death of Amber Nicole Thurman was not. She was perhaps the first woman killed by the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
In June 2022, the Supreme Court ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Womenâs Health Organization removed the constitutional right to an abortion guaranteed by Roe. As a result, individual states reverted to their own laws. In Georgia, where Thurman lived, abortions became illegal from the time when a âdetectable human heartbeatâ was presentâaround six weeks into pregnancy. The law came into effect in late July of that year, at the same time that Thurman, a 28-year-old medical assistant, discovered that she was six weeks pregnant with twins.
Thanks to ProPublica, which obtained Thurmanâs medical records with her familyâs permission, we can see what happened next. She already had a 6-year-old son, and decided that she could not raise two more children. But she couldnât get a termination in her home state. And so she scheduled a surgical abortion in North Carolina, took a day off work, hired a babysitter, borrowed a relativeâs car on a false pretext, and got up at 4 a.m. to drive four hours with a friend to the clinic. But they hit traffic, and Thurman missed her appointment. The clinic could not give her another time slot, because so many women from out of state, also facing tough new laws, were booked on that day.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/09/women-killed-dobbs-decision-abortion/679921/