Anti-Abortion Groups Blame the Victim

9.19.24

Click to skip ahead: In Post-Dobbs Deaths, the anti-abortion movement blames the victim. 2024 news looks at Kamala Harris response to the Georgia deaths and the growing focus on abortion rights. In the States, news from North Dakota, Florida, Louisiana and more. Ballot Measure Updates looks at Missouri, Florida and Ohio. In the Nation, some quick hits.

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Post-Dobbs Deaths

I’m sure folks have seen it by now, but ProPublica has published another story of a woman killed by Georgia’s abortion ban. Candi Miller died at home, too afraid to seek out care in her anti-abortion state after trying to self-manage an abortion. Her story comes on the heels of the news that Amber Thurman died in an Atlanta hospital after being denied a D&C.

It’s hard to know what to say at this point. Please read both articles about these women, if you haven’t already. Please share their stories, and make sure people in your life know that for every story we hear there are a hundred more that will never be told.

And remember, the people who created these laws knew women would die. Not only that, they expected it. They planned for it, polled and messaged it—they strategized their talking points! Everything they say now is the result of decades of work preparing for this moment.

As I wrote earlier this week, the anti-abortion response to these women’s deaths has been entirely unsurprising. In fact, I predicted how this would go back in 2022:

Conservatives are Preparing for the First Post-Roe Death

They’re blaming abortion medication, which every credible study shows is safe. They’re blaming doctors, who are operating under the threat of losing their licenses and freedom. And—perhaps most incredibly—they’re blaming pro-choicers, who they claim are spreading “misinformation” about abortion laws that endanger women.

Let’s take a look at just how closely anti-abortion activists stuck to the script they wrote for themselves years ago: Katie Glenn Daniel, the state policy director of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, wasted no time in claiming that “abortion drugs are inherently dangerous.” But has Daniel knows, Thurman didn’t die because of abortion medication; she died because doctors waited 20 hours before giving her what should have been immediate care and a standard procedure.

Christina Francis, president of the American Association of Pro-Life OBGYNs (AAPLOG), claims that “dangerous lies…about abortion laws are killing women.” Her argument is that by pointing out that abortion bans endanger women, we are ‘scaring’ doctors out of giving care. Once again, this is a tactic they carefully planned out: Set the world on fire and then blame the people who point out that shit is burning.

If you don’t remember who Francis is, by the way, make sure to read Abortion, Every Day’s profile of her and AAPLOG; this is a group that says abortion is never necessary to save someone’s life, and wants doctors to give women c-sections instead of abortions, even before fetal viability.

What made me even more infuriated about her video was that she had the nerve to invoke Thurman and Miller’s names, pretending to care about their deaths even as she promotes laws that kill women.

Indeed, Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America (SBA PLA) also co-opted their deaths, putting out a press release calling “for justice” for the two women, claiming that their died “following failed abortions.”

Even in their attempts to lie and cover their tracks, though, these groups can’t help but leave breadcrumbs about who they really are. Both Francis’ comments and the release from SBA PLA don’t say that ‘abortions’ are legal when women’s lives are at risk. Instead, they say that doctors are allowed “to intervene” or “to act.” Anti-abortion activist Michael New also uses the term “intervene” in his National Review column claiming that Georgia’s abortion ban didn’t kill anyone.

That’s because they don’t want women to ever have abortions, even when they’re on death’s door—and because they’re pushing doctors to force women into vaginal births or c-sections rather than safer, easier, and less painful abortions.

Absolute fucking ghouls.

WATCH: Sen. Jon Ossoff on MSNBC talking about how Amber’s death was absolutely preventable, and a ProPublica editor talk to CNN’s Jake Tapper about their investigation.

READ: Amanda Marcotte at Salon about how anti-abortion activists are blaming the victim, and Moira Donegan at The Guardian on how bans treat women’s lives as “alarmingly disposable.”

“When abortion bans kill, they reveal their true purpose: to grant a handful of extremists power over the lives and deaths of American women. Women aren’t human beings to these extremists; to them, there is nothing real about female suffering.”

- Sarah Jones, New York Magazine

2024

In response to the deaths of Amber Thurman and Candi Miller, Vice President Kamala Harris will travel to Georgia tomorrow to give a speech on abortion rights. A campaign official has said she will address the women’s deaths in her remarks.

Harris also spoke about abortion yesterday in her speech at the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute’s leadership conference. What was so interesting about those remarks was that Harris described, in detail, what it means to travel out-of-state for an abortion—laying out just how difficult, complicated, and cruel it is to force someone to leave their home for care.

“So, she’s got to now travel to another state—God help her that she has some extra money to pay for that plane ticket. She’s got to figure out what to do with her kids—God help her if she has affordable child care. Imagine what that means: She has to leave her home to go to an airport, stand in a TSA line… to get on a plane sitting next to a perfect stranger, going to a city that she’s never been to go an receive a medical procedure. [After the abortion,] she’s going to have to get right back to the airport because she [has] got to get back to those kids. And it’s not like her best friend can go with her because her best friend is probably taking care of the kids. All because these people have decided they’re in a better position to tell her what’s in her best interest than she is to know.”

You can watch her full remarks here.

The Harris campaign also released this incredibly powerful ad this week featuring Hadley Duvall, the young woman who has been sharing her story of childhood sexual abuse:

I’ve been doing this work for a long time, and sometimes I think I’m jaded. But then I watch something like this and my heart just breaks open all over again.

Quick hits:

• The Harris/Walz Reproductive Freedom Tour Bus will be in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania this week;

• CNN on how Harris’ campaign is reaching male voters on abortion rights;

• Kali Nicole Gross writes at TIME why Harris’ promises on abortion mean so much to Black women;

• And Axios reports that Sen. Chuck Schumer's super PAC will air a new ad focused on abortion in Michigan this week.

In the States

Well that didn’t take long. Republican leaders in North Dakota are asking the judge who struck down the state’s abortion ban last week to pause his ruling. They want the ban to go back into effect while the state Supreme Court considers their planned appeal. They wouldn’t want women having even a few months of freedom, after all!

I’m hopeful that it won’t happen. After all, the ruling from Judge Bruce Romanick made clear that he saw what this law was really about:

“The reality is that ‘individuals’ did not draft and enact the North Dakota Constitution. Men did. And many, if not all, of the men who enacted the North Dakota Constitution, and who wrote the state laws of the time, did not view women as equal citizens with equal liberty interests.”

A new report from Physicians for Human Rights shows the impact of Florida’s 6-week abortion ban—and it’s about as bad as you can imagine. Researchers interviewed 25 clinicians who described a nightmare of care denied across the state, compounded by intersecting issues like medical provider shortages and maternity care deserts.

Researchers report, for example, that the clinician shortage means patients can’t get a timely appointment to confirm their pregnancy before 6 weeks. The report also found that doctors are often unaware of how the law works, or terrified of the potential punishments should they break it. So they’re automatically referring any complicated cases out-of-state and are refusing to provide care that goes even one day past the 6-week cutoff.

The entire report is worth reading, if you can stomach it, because of the incredible stories from the ground. Whether it’s doctors having to convince a panel of hospital administrators that their patients’ 10% chance of a coronary artery dissection is “enough” to qualify for an abortion, or having to tell patients with nonviable pregnancies that they can’t do anything to help them—the report paints a stark picture of the everyday cruelty of these laws.

The other thing worth noting in the report is something I’ve flagged here often: the uselessness of so-called exceptions, particularly those for fatal fetal anomalies. Florida’s definition of a fatal abnormality is a condition that is “incompatible with life outside the womb and will result in death upon birth or imminently thereafter.” As I’ve written before, that language means that Republicans can argue that a condition that would result in death days or months after birth would not be considered sufficiently lethal.

One genetic counselor, for example, reported that heir hospital lawyers decided that “imminently lethal” meant “lethal, essentially, within the first day of life.”

We’re just days away from Louisiana’s law going into effect that classifies abortion medication as a controlled substance. As I wrote earlier this week, this means that the drugs, which are used to control hemorrhaging, will be under lock and key—making it all the more difficult for doctors to get to them during emergencies. (The story of doctors doing timed drills to prepare just absolutely broke me.)

Axios New Orleans reports that New Orleans City Council will vote this week on a motion to direct the city’s health department to "investigate and study any delay of care issues” as a result of the law. And while the Louisiana Department of Health sent out a memo assuring the medical community that the drugs could still be used to treat bleeding and incomplete miscarriages, they also wrote that the medication must be kept in a "locked/secured cabinet, compartment or other system.”

Still, Republicans in the state insist that it won’t hurt medical care for women. Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill said in a statement that the law doesn’t “impose restrictive burdens on access for emergency purposes.” You know, besides making it so hard to get that doctors have to run timed drills to make sure they can save patients’ lives.

For more on the law in Louisiana and what it means for the state and beyond, click here.

Finally, a new abortion clinic is opening up in Kansas, with the aim of helping providers with the influx of out-of-state patients. Logan Rink, the manager of the new Pittsburg Planned Parenthood clinic, says, “I think that really lends to the location and being more accessible to people in Missouri, Oklahoma, and Arkansas.” Since Roe was overturned, travel for abortion has increased exponentially, with doctors in pro-choice states reporting being overwhelmed with new patients. So clinics like this are especially important.

Quick hits:

• A House Republican in a contested seat in Florida refuses to say how she’ll vote on Amendment 4;

• Montana Democratic Sen. Jon Tester was on MSNBC this week saying that “we need to have Roe restored,”

• And abortion is driving voters to the polls, even in pro-choice states like New Jersey.

Ballot Measure Updates

I don’t know about you, but I’m still thinking about the ballot measure fight in Florida, where Republicans are throwing everything they can at the wall to stop voters from having a say. As you know, Gov. Ron DeSantis has dispatched his ‘election police’ to find evidence of fraud in the petition signatures in support of Amendment 4—even thought the signatures they’re investigating have already been verified. Here’s Lauren Brenzel, campaign director for Yes on 4, talking to Tessa Stuart at Rolling Stone:

“We paid $1.1 million to the state of Florida to have them validate the signatures. The attempts to question that are very much the Florida playbook: When you’re losing on an issue, it’s much easier to make accusations about ‘malfeasance’ than it is to acknowledge a really unpopular policy. The state knows that abortion access is popular and doesn’t want to speak to the actual issue at hand here, which is that Florida has one of the most harmful abortion bans in the nation.”

It doesn’t get more dead-on correct than that. Especially after you read that report about the impact of Florida’s abortion ban.

Also in Florida, the Tampa Bay Times editorial board has endorsed Amendment 4, writing that Americans “rightly believe that medical decisions should be left to patients and their doctors, not the government.”

Meanwhile, if you want to know more about the attacks on democracy in Missouri, check out this interview with Planned Parenthood Great Plains CEO Emily Wales. (The interview somewhat makes up for the fact that the same television station decided to have an all-male roundtable on the issue.)

Finally, abortion rights may have won in Ohio, but the implementation of the state’s new pro-choice amendment will be up to the state Supreme Court. And as the Ohio Capital Journal points out today, “whichever justices are elected this year will help determine what abortion care looks like” in the state. We’ll keeping a close eye on this one come November.

In the Nation

• USA Today on why young women today are more liberal (I think you can guess);

• Ms. magazine on the power of abortion storytelling;

• There will be screenings of “Red, White and Blue,” the the Oscar-nominated short film about abortion, ahead of the election;

• And if you missed this moment with Lawrence O’Donnell, it’s worth watching. The MSNBC host was brought to tears when talking about the death of Amber Nicole Thurman, sharing that his own mother’s life was shared by the procedure that Thurman was denied.