With only a few weeks to go before the 2024 presidential election, the fate of abortion access in the United States has become a central issue on the campaign trail. While GOP candidate Donald Trump and his running mate, J.D. Vance, appear to be committed to spreading misinformation about abortion, Democratic challenger Kamala Harris has taken a different approach. On Wednesday, Harris released a new campaign ad featuring the family of Amber Thurman, the 28-year-old Black mother who died in 2022 after her home state of Georgia’s restrictive abortion laws prevented doctors from performing a dilation and curettage (or D&C) that could have saved her life. Watch the ad for yourself above.
“What happened to her is preventable. My daughter is gone because of what Donald Trump did,” Thurman’s mother, Shanette Williams, says in the ad, referencing the Southern abortion bans that followed the overturning of Roe v. Wade—in which Trump’s three Supreme Court appointees voted with the majority—in June of 2022. (Thurman died just two months later, after ending up in the hospital due to a rare complication from taking abortion pills.)
“Thurman waited in pain in a hospital bed, worried about what would happen to her six-year-old son, as doctors monitored her infection spreading, her blood pressure sinking and her organs beginning to fail,” reads the ProPublica report that originally released Thurman’s medical records last month. “It took 20 hours for doctors to finally operate. By then, it was too late.” A Georgia state medical committee recently found Thurman’s death to be largely the result of delayed abortion care offered to her by attending doctors.
Harris’s choice to illustrate the necessity of abortion care through Thurman’s story is a thoughtful one, given that Black women—who are uniquely impacted by post-Roe abortion restrictions—also make up a significant voting block in the 2024 election. Ultimately, though, Thurman’s story needs to be told not merely in the service of a campaign but because the lifesaving care withheld from her and thousands of other women constitutes a major injustice—something that anyone who is serious about reproductive rights in the US needs to acknowledge.
