While relaying the news story of Amber Thurman, who died in Georgia in 2022 after a botched chemical abortion, Lawrence O’Donnell, the host of MSNBC’s “The Last Word,” further spread the misinformation that the dilation and curettage (D&C) procedure is a felony in Georgia — a claim many sources, including Live Action News, have debunked. It is completely legal to carry out a D&C in the state, except when used to deliberately kill a preborn child.
“ProPublica is now reporting about the death of a 28-year-old woman in Georgia who died because of what George W. Bush and Donald Trump did to her when they appointed those Supreme Court justices,” O’Donnell said.
William Vaillancourt for the Daily Beast further opined, “Georgia’s Republican legislators decided that performing the routine procedure should be a felony.”
Again, these claims are FALSE.
After a while, one has to ask: do media pundits truly believe what they’re saying, or are they just counting on the American public to believe their lies?
O’Donnell continued:
My mother had given birth to five healthy children, but she kept going. She was trying, trying to have a sister for her only daughter. Trying for one more. And she suffered a miscarriage, and she routinely had a D&C at a local hospital in Boston years before abortion was legal, because a D&C has absolutely nothing to do with abortion.
None of the Catholic nuns teaching me at my elementary school then thought my mother should not have that procedure. Our beloved Monsignor Brandley knew that when mothers in St. Brendan’s Parish had miscarriages, doctors should give them whatever treatment they needed.
Anti-abortion Catholic doctors performed the procedure routinely. There wasn’t a single Irish Catholic politician in Boston – including the mayor and district attorney – who ever tried to interfere with that medical procedure. Their sisters were having that procedure, their daughters were having that procedure routinely in anti-abortion Boston, because it has nothing to do with abortion. Nothing.
O’Donnell is right — a D&C procedure is carried out for a variety of reasons, including for a missed miscarriage, removing retained tissue after delivery, taking samples of the uterine lining to test for cancer, and removing fibroids. No pro-lifer or pro-life law is against the D&C procedure itself.
However, if the D&C procedure is used with the intent to deliberately kill a still-living preborn child in the womb, this is what the law disallows. It is not the D&C procedure that is illegal; it is the act of using it to electively kill that is prohibited.
What Georgia HB 481 states
The Georgia law defines abortion as:
…the act of using, prescribing, or administering any instrument, substance, device, or other means with the purpose to terminate a pregnancy with knowledge that the termination will, with reasonable likelihood, cause the death of an unborn child; provided, however, that any such act shall not be considered an abortion if the act is performed with the purpose of:
A) Removing a dead unborn child caused by spontaneous abortion [miscarriage]
It further states, “It shall be an affirmative defense to prosecution under this article if: 159 (1) A licensed physician provides medical treatment to a pregnant woman which results in the accidental or unintentional injury to or death of an unborn child…”
There is also an exception in the law, allowing the induced abortion of a living baby in the case of a medical emergency (Amber Thurman’s case was absolutely a medical emergency) and the law does not even mention the D&C procedure specifically.
What happened to Amber Thurman?
Thurman was suffering from sepsis as a result of a failed chemical abortion. Sepsis is a known but rare risk of the abortion pill regimen; the risk of incomplete abortion increases with each additional week of gestation — and Thurman was pregnant with 9-week twins. Thurman eventually began vomiting blood, and passed out at home. Her boyfriend called 911, and she was taken to Piedmont Henry Hospital, which has just two stars and a series of horrific reviews on Google.
The signs of sepsis were obvious, but instead of performing the necessary D&C to save her life, doctors waited and simply began a course of antibiotics for her infection. It is unknown why they waited, but one OB/GYN noted the possibility of performing a D&C the next day. Many hours after Thurman arrived at the hospital, her condition had deteriorated so badly that a hysterectomy became necessary. Already in organ failure by then, she died on the operating table.
ProPublica reported, “Doctors and a nurse involved in Thurman’s care declined to explain their thinking and did not respond to questions from ProPublica.” One particular review for the very same hospital on Google shared a similar story about a week ago (emphasis added):
A little over a week ago my husband took me to the ER for a miscarriage. When we got there I was very unsteady and had left a trail of blood from the car to the front desk. I had to stand at the check in desk for 5 minutes answering questions on the verge of passing out while the nurse behind the counter complained to me about how bad her knee hurt.
After checking in they refused to give us an estimated wait time so I waited in the restroom. 30-45 minutes go by of me actively bleeding and multiple other ER patients checking on me in the restroom, passing my baby alone in the restroom, then the nurse with the injured knee comes in and hands me a cup and tells me to put my baby in the cup if I felt like I was having it. I was too weak at this point to really talk or do anything and she left.
About 5 minutes later she came back with a wheel chair and realized how compromised I was and took me to the back. Once I was in a room they hooked me up to a bp cuff wrong which gave them a normal-ish bp reading, a couple minutes later they were trying to place an IV and I told the nurse I was lightheaded and passed out. While I was passed out I had a seizure like reaction and the ER doctor and both nurses froze according to my husband. They replaced my bp cuff and my bp was 80/40 and they put 2 more iv catheters in and gave me fluids to raise it.
After a while I regained consciousness and the Dr resumed checking me and running tests etc. … After being admitted, I continued to receive substandard care. … On top of it all my husband and I were never told that I was septic, just that I had an infection, and severe sepsis was the primary diagnosis on my discharge paperwork.
Despite the lingering questions surrounding the care Amber Thurman received at Piedmont, media pundit Lawrence O’Donnell blamed pro-life politicians for her death, saying, “If a politician interfered with that procedure and killed – killed my mother when I was 6 years old, who is going to tell that boy? Who is going to tell that 6-year-old how his mother died, and who is really responsible?”
He called the law “sheer madness, criminal madness, murderous madness.”
Well… if the law actually did make D&Cs a felony, perhaps O’Donnell would have a leg to stand on. But it doesn’t. So he’s simply spreading propaganda.
The law did not prevent Thurman from getting the care she needed. Negligent medical staff did.
