| Hello Repro Nation readers!
One day after we learned the names of two women who died due to a post-Dobbs abortion ban, Vice President Kamala Harris declared, “This…is a health care crisis.” Speaking from a live-streamed campaign event with Oprah Winfrey on Thursday, Harris told the audience in Michigan that state lawmakers are interfering in medical decisions, forcing doctors to wait until their patients are on death’s door to intervene, which in the case of 28-year-old Amber Thurman was much too late.
Amber’s mother, who was in the audience, explained that her daughter was more than a statistic. She was the mother of a 6-year-old boy and had just secured her own apartment, as ProPublica’s Kavitha Surana reported, and was making plans to enroll in nursing school. She was loved by her family—“a strong family,” her mother said.
But the one word that has been turning over in her mind since the ProPublica report, which was how the family learned what caused Amanda’s death, is “preventable,” she told Harris. Her daughter’s death would not have happened if she had promptly received a common medical procedure, called a D&C, to clear out pregnancy tissue that had not emptied from her uterus after her medication abortion. Instead, she was left to die of sepsis after doctors, fearing criminal prosecution, delayed performing the D&C for 20 hours. During that time, her organs began shutting down.
Preventable.
Another word is “predictable,” Harris said at an event in Atlanta on Friday. “The reality is, for every story we hear of the suffering under Trump abortion bans, there are so many stories we’re not hearing, but where suffering is happening every day in our country.”
In 40 days, we’ll have a chance to elect new leaders, and Harris has vowed to do everything she can to restore Roe and end the crisis her opponent created when he nominated three conservative justices to the Supreme Court. Voting in this election, and voting up and down the ballot, is an important step, but it is not the only step we should be taking to achieve reproductive freedom.
In my and Renee Bracey Sherman’s book, Liberating Abortion, which is out on October 1, we argue that we need to liberate abortion; simply restoring Roe won’t do that. Roe did not prevent Rosie Jimenez’s death in 1977, or Becky Bell’s death in 1988, as Nation abortion access correspondent Amy Littlefield wrote last week. And since the launch of Israel’s assault on Gaza, we’ve witnessed the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent people—including children, pregnant people, parents, and grandparents—due to our government’s failure to end the violence and killings of Palestinians. No single piece of legislation will be enough to prevent the heartbreak that we witness every day due to reproductive injustices in the United States and around the world. Not only do we all deserve a better future, our children and future generations deserve better too.
Vote in the coming election, but don’t stop there. We must keep working until we’ve achieved abortion liberation and reproductive justice for all.
In solidarity,
Regina Mahone
Senior Editor |
academiccompositionab
Empowerment Equalizer
SSaragian
Antony Sammeroff
Ann Sterzinger
Rodney
RJ
busterjames
cainusmaxus
Craig FitzGerald
David Heleniak
Caity & Dan Greene
keirmartland
Keith Preston
Bill the Butcher
ljp711
MRDA
Jack Donovan
Rachel Haywire
comrade hermit
Michael
Vince
Regan
robertstark2014
Noonan
S E Pearson
Rachel Haywire
Nexus X Humectress
