The following is a reprint of Timothy P. Carney’s column in the Washington Examiner on Sept. 20, 2024.

A woman in Georgia got a legal abortion, and it killed her.  If this isn’t how you understand the tragic death of Amber Thurman, that’s because you have been misled by a Democratic Party desperate to politicize her death and by macabre media that believe defending abortion is more important than getting a story straight.

Vice President Kamala Harris, along with most of her party, is blaming Thurman’s death on Georgia’s law banning the abortion of babies who have a heartbeat. This lie, originated by liberal outlet ProPublica, is not only slander, it is also dangerous: It endangers the lives of other women who turn to the abortion pill to end their pregnancies.

Thurman, a single mother of a young boy, learned in the summer of 2022 that she was pregnant with twins. Concluding these children would disrupt “her newfound stability,” ProPublica explained, Thurman decided to abort them. When logistical problems derailed her plan of a surgical abortion, Thurman settled on a chemical abortion.

An abortion clinic in North Carolina gave her a mifepristone pill and sent her home with a second pill — misoprostol. These pills not only caused fetal demise — which is their purpose — they also killed Thurman.

The abortion pills killed Thurman because by killing her twins, they left her with two dead bodies inside her. Her body didn’t expel the entirety of their remains, and the result was sepsis, a common consequence of abortion pills.

Here’s how ProPublica described what happened to Thurman after her abortion:

“She had not expelled all of the fetal tissue from her body. She showed up at Piedmont Henry Hospital in need of a routine procedure to clear it from her uterus, called a dilation and curettage, or D&C.”

The hospital, for reasons never explained in the ProPublica article, didn’t get around to removing the remains for 20 hours. The sepsis had advanced too far at that point, and it killed her on the operating table.

ProPublica and Democrats assert that Thurman would have survived the consequences of her chemical abortion if not for the Georgia abortion law.

“Just that summer, her state had made performing the procedure a felony, with few exceptions,” the article states. “Any doctor who violated the new Georgia law could be prosecuted and face up to a decade in prison.”

The implication here is that Georgia’s law somehow prevented Piedmont Henry Hospital in Georgia from removing the remains of the dead Thurman twins from their mother. This is false.

It is not up for debate. It’s simply false.

There is no way to read Georgia’s law and believe that it bars a life-saving D&C of dead post-abortion human remains.

Read the rest here.