Abortion Bans Are Designed to Kill

'Pro-family’ politicians and lobbyists spent years carefully, strategically, and callously planning for our deaths

I watched a movie recently about men who got away with horribly abusing women by erasing their memories. These men told themselves and their victims that it was better to forget—why relive the trauma? As if erasing the abuse was some favor they were doing for the women, rather than a transparent move to avoid responsibility.

I couldn’t help but think about what’s happening right now, in these critical weeks before the election, as Republican legislators work so hard to make women forget the horrors we’ve endured over the last two plus years. Anything to avoid responsibility for the nightmare they spent five decades creating.

Since the end of Roe, we’ve watched women arrested for miscarriages, children forced to give birth, cancer patients denied care, and women stripped of vital reproductive organs. We’ve seen women die. 

We now live in a country where hospitals routinely turn away miscarrying patients, and OBGYNs advise pregnant women to get insurance to cover helicopter flights in case they need emergency care that would be illegal in their home state. 

All this, so a handful of conservative men can proudly declare themselves protectors of ‘life’. Whose lives, I wonder, are they protecting? Certainly not ours. 

The political leaders tasked to safeguard us instead fight to deny women emergency abortions or pass laws that require us to become paralyzed and infertile rather than end a pregnancy. Even the deaths of women and infants aren’t enough to spur empathy: Since Texas passed its abortion ban, for example, infant mortality jumped by nearly 13% and maternal mortality increased by 56%.

How many mothers are they willing to kill in the name of being ‘pro-family’?

Because let’s be clear: anti-abortion politicians and lobbyists knew women would die if they overturned Roe, and they did it anyway. They spent years carefully, strategically, and callously planning for our deaths. I mean that literally.

Republicans are appointing anti-abortion extremists to maternal mortality review committees or disbanding these boards altogether. At the same time, anti-abortion organizations are sowing distrust in credible maternal death data, while Republicans pass laws that artificially inflate abortion ‘complication’ rates—efforts designed to make it seem that abortion is killing women, rather than the laws prohibiting it.

In fact, there’s an entire cottage industry devoted to hiding how deadly abortion bans are—from anti-choice ‘experts’ who testify in legislative hearings to the organizations churning out dubious studies that conservative lawmakers can use as ‘proof’ that abortion bans are perfectly safe. The tactic I think about most, though, is the one I warned about just over two years ago.

In October 2022, I reported that anti-abortion lawmakers and activists were testing out a new talking point in anticipation of the first reported post-Dobbs death. Prompted by stories of burst ectopic pregnancies and women left bleeding for days, Republicans knew it was only a matter of time before someone died. So they decided to get ahead of the inevitable.

Suddenly, anti-abortion legislators, activists, and conservative pundits began claiming—almost in unison—that abortion bans don’t stop doctors from providing care. Instead, they insisted women were being denied care because pro-choicers had frightened medical professionals and their lawyers into misreading the laws. “In other words, they set the world on fire and want to blame the people pointing out that it’s burning,” I wrote at the time.

Today, this is the exact anti-abortion response to the deaths of Candi Miller and Amber Nicole Thurman. Legislators and activists alike claim that it’s pro-choice “fearmongering and lies” about anti-abortion laws that killed the two women.

We’re supposed to believe—despite a determination from Georgia’s maternal mortality review committee and two years of horror stories—that these deaths have nothing to do with abortion bans. That hospital lawyers across the country don’t know how to do their jobs, and that the laws anti-abortion activists spent decades drafting aren’t being interpreted exactly as intended. Come on.

It’s not a coincidence that these messages are echoed, almost verbatim, by conservative media. (When I say this is all by design, I mean it.)

The Washington Examiner has blamed “abortion disinformation” for Thurman and Miller’s deaths, while the Wall Street Journal accused Vice President Kamala Harris of “exploiting” a tragedy that had nothing to do with abortion bans. A Fox News article claimed that Georgia doctors were speaking out against “misinformation” about the state’s ban—but it turned out to be an interview of two Republican lawmakers who happened to be doctors. The anti-abortion legislators repeated the talking points we’ve seen elsewhere, but Rep. Rich McCormick also let something telling slip:

“The mother's life is always protected. With that said, it doesn't mean it's easy to get an abortion just because you have a complication or because something goes wrong."

Yes, we wouldn’t want it to be too easy to save a woman’s life. 

And that’s the rub: American women aren’t just living through the tragedy of having lost a fundamental human right—we’re watching our suffering become business as usual.

It’s the mundanity that hits hardest. 

The anti-abortion movement is creating a country where it’s routine for women to be left bleeding for days on end, or for pregnant women with cancer to beg hospital boards to save their life so they don’t leave their already-existing children behind.

Republicans know their laws require women to suffer, so they need to normalize our pain as quickly as possible. That’s why powerful extremist groups like the American Association of Pro-Life OBGYNs (AAPLOG) are pushing to redefine what’s considered ‘medically standard’—whether it’s recommending delayed treatment for deadly complications like massive placental abruption or pushing doctors to give women with life-threatening pregnancies c-sections instead of safer, less traumatic abortions.

I think often of what one anti-abortion columnist wrote in response to Kate Cox’s story going viral:

“[S]uffering is part of life. It’s most assuredly part of motherhood. The notion that we, as mothers, have agency over the circumstances of our pregnancies, births and even our children, is pure folly.”

In other words, how dare we expect to live our lives pain-free—especially when it comes to pregnancy.

In a country that expects women to sacrifice everything for their pregnancies, it’s an easily internalized message. So let me be clear: There’s nothing normal about telling women to suck it up and get sepsis. There’s nothing usual about some states being so dangerous for pregnant women that Democratic lawmakers are considering creating travel advisories with a color-coded warning system.

We need to speak plainly about what’s really happening: These politicians are killing us. 

Just because Georgia Republicans won’t go to jail doesn’t mean that they didn’t murder Amber Nicole Thurman. The Texas lawmakers in suits sitting comfortably behind their desks are as guilty of assault and battery on Amanda Zurawski as any other criminal who hurts women.

Anti-abortion lawmakers and activists think they can distance themselves from what they’ve done to American women—horrors they meticulously planned and continue to try to cover up. They need us to forget or accept what’s been clear every day since Roe was overturned.

I don’t know about you, I’m not willing to do either.