Honoring Amber Nicole Thurman

October 16, 2024

Amber Nicole Thurman should be alive right now. But in 2022, due to Georgia’s extreme six-week abortion ban (which has since been struck down), Amber Nicole Thurman, a 28-year-old Black woman, mother, daughter, sister, friend, and human being, died.

Amber took abortion pills and encountered a rare complication, causing her to go to a Georgia hospital. But under Georgia’s ban, the hospital could not do what it’s supposed to do: save lives. It took doctors 20 hours – while Amber was in pain, her condition worsening – to decide to operate. It was too late.

The tragedy of Amber’s death is in part due to its preventability. Had Amber not been caught in what Jessica Mason Pieklo terms the “tug of war of legal challenges” around Georgia’s ban, had she not had to travel to North Carolina for care, she might be alive today. Had Amber resided in a state where she could access basic, life-saving healthcare, she might never have had to utter her devastating last words: “Promise me you’ll take care of my son.”

Pieklo notes that Amber is perhaps the first reported person since Roe v. Wade was overturned whose death was directly caused by a state abortion ban – but hers isn’t the only one. And one death caused by lack of abortion care is one too many.

Amber should be alive right now. We at the Woodhull Freedom Foundation are profoundly saddened and outraged by Amber’s death. We join the scores of advocates agitating for reproductive justice and sexual freedom, working to ensure that we all have access to abortion care.