ProPublica’s abortion disinformation goes national

If they handed out awards for Sleaziest News Operation, ProPublica would give even the lowest-brow tabloid a run for its money.

Case in point: The non-profit media group pushed a shockingly dishonest narrative last week, blaming the United States Supreme Court and the Georgia state legislature for an Atlanta-area hospital’s fatal decision in 2022 not to render timely aid to a young mother who had developed a life-threatening infection following a chemical abortion. Were it not for the fall of Roe vs. Wade, its narrative alleges, Amber Nicole Thurman would still be alive.

The article provides no evidence that this is true, but that hasn’t prevented the story from going national, even to the point that Vice President Kamala Harris gave a speech about it in Georgia on Friday.

Thurman discovered she was pregnant with twins at six weeks. After she missed an appointment to terminate her pregnancy at an abortion facility in North Carolina, the same facility put her on a prescribed abortion pill regimen of mifepristone and misoprostol, assuring her the medications were perfectly safe.

Thurman developed sepsis soon after she started the regimen, at around nine weeks of pregnancy. Later, after her condition worsened, she went to Piedmont Henry Hospital in Georgia for a routine dilation and curettage procedure. Somehow, 20 hours passed before she was admitted into the operating room. Thurman died shortly thereafter. She is survived by her six-year-old son.

The way ProPublica tells it, the parties most responsible for Thurman’s death are Georgia, which passed a six-week fetal heartbeat law in 2022, and the Supreme Court, which overturned Roe vs. Wade in 2022 with its Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision.

This is nonsense pushed in an election year by an organization hellbent on undermining trust in the nation’s highest court.

“Abortion Bans Have Delayed Emergency Medical Care. In Georgia, Experts Say This Mother’s Death Was Preventable,” reads a Sept. 16 headline published by ProPublica. “At least two women in Georgia died after they couldn’t access legal abortions and timely medical care in their state, ProPublica has found.”

Competing media outlets were quick to piggyback on ProPublica’s “reporting,” including the Atlantic (“The Women Killed by the Dobbs Decision”), the Nation (“An Abortion Ban Killed Amber Thurman — and Likely Many More”), Newsweek (“Amber Thurman First Named ‘Preventable’ Abortion Death Since Bans”) and the New York Times (“It Was Only a Matter of Time Before Abortion Bans Killed Someone”).

If only these outlets put the same effort into double-checking their stories as they do into cribbing each other’s work. 

ProPublica’s central claim is that Georgia and the Supreme Court have created a legal minefield, leaving doctors too scared and confused to provide timely safe, and decent care. It’s so confusing — or so the story goes — that doctors in states like Georgia would rather ignore the first rule of the Hippocratic Oath and let a patient die than face potential criminal liability.

But the ProPublica article never actually quotes or even references any doctor involved directly in Thurman’s care as saying any such thing. The report only ever quotes third-party “experts” who theorize — that is, speculate — that Dobbs and the heartbeat law (maybe, probably) killed the young woman. 

It’s a shame we never hear from Thurman’s doctors directly, because there are at least a few of us who would like to know which part of Georgia’s abortion law, exactly, has them confused and scared enough to ignore a sepsis patient for almost an entire day.

For reference, Georgia’s abortion law defines abortion as “using, prescribing, or administering any instrument, substance, device, or other means with the purpose to terminate a pregnancy with knowledge that termination will, with reasonable likelihood, cause the death of an unborn child.” However, it also explicitly provides 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; or (B) Removing an ectopic pregnancy.”

At the Atlantic, staff writer Helen Lewis declared, “Thurman got bad care because her doctors feared being prosecuted for giving her a [dilation and curettage].” This is a hell of a thing to allege, and not just because there is no state in which this procedure under this exact circumstance is illegal. It’s a hell of a thing to allege because — and this cannot be stressed enough — no medical professional directly involved in the Thurman case has said such a thing.

“America is a litigious country,” Lewis argues. “In this climate, doctors are naturally scared of legal action.”

Again, what do Thurman’s doctors have to say about that 20-hour wait time? We have no idea.

The ProPublica story even includes a section that expressly concedes, “Doctors and a nurse involved in Thurman’s care declined to explain their thinking and did not respond to questions from ProPublica. Communications staff from the hospital did not respond to multiple requests for comment.”

But if, by its own admission, ProPublica has no idea what went into the thinking behind delaying Thurman’s care, then how are we to explain this explanation in the article’s opening: “She’d taken abortion pills and encountered a rare complication; 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. But just that summer, her state had made performing the procedure a felony, with few exceptions. Any doctor who violated the new Georgia law could be prosecuted and face up to a decade in prison. It took 20 hours for doctors to finally operate. By then, it was too late.”

No explanation is given for that 20-hour wait period. There are no on-the-record quotes or even on-background references. It’s just speculation, culminating in the none-too-subtle suggestion that Piedmont dithered because of Dobbs and state law. For the record, speculation is not the same thing as reporting.

Speaking of doctors and going on the record, here’s an on-the-record quote from obstetrician-gynecologist, practicing obstetric hospitalist, and chief executive officer of the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists Christina Francis, published this week by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution: “[T]he state’s abortion law did not stand in the way of saving her life…It explicitly allows physicians to intervene in cases of medical emergencies or if the fetus has no detectable heartbeat (both of which applied to Thurman’s case), and any assertion that she experienced a delay in care as a secondary effect of the law is mere speculation. One thing is clear: Thurman died from a legal chemical abortion, which abortion advocates have long argued is ‘safer than Tylenol.’ Thurman’s story proves otherwise — as do countless other women’s.”

If anything, Thurman’s story is about medical malpractice, not any state or federal abortion legislation. But if you’re in ProPublica’s position, why tell a local story when you can exploit a hot-button political issue? Those donation checks aren’t going to write themselves.

Becket Adams is a writer in Washington and program director for the National Journalism Center.