#fetal tissue

[meandmybigmouth]

You can’t make this shit up!. These fucks are crazy!

[haggishlyhagging]

All technology is not automatically progress. Regulating a technology does not ensure that a technology will be used in a progressive way. Regulation does not address the international trafficking potential for fetal tissue or the casting of women in the role of human incubators. There can be no exploitation of fetuses or children without a prior exploitation of women, from whence fetuses and children come.

The situation of women and children is very much connected; this is a biological but, more significantly, a political fact. Both women and children share in the same kinds of sexual abuse, and increasingly both become commodities on the international reproductive market. Both are subject increasingly to medical experimentation. New reproductive arrangements, such as surrogacy, are increasing the traffic in women and children across national borders. Women are the breeders; children are the product bred. We have here the international harvesting of women and children.

Many U.S. Americans recognize the horrors of the child organ and illegal adoption trade. Yet they approve of legislation legalizing and/or regulating surrogate contracts, without seeing any connection between the former and the latter. Surrogacy is the acceptable face of reproductive trafficking, yet there is little distinction between a domestic and an intercountry market in women and children. What we call surrogacy in the West is a variant on baby selling abroad. One is soft-core exploitation, the other hard-core. One is glossy, the other graphic. The only distinction is that in surrogacy, the father buys his own genetic child and thereby confers legitimacy on surrogate arrangements because the child is recognized as "his."

The reproductive trafficking in women and children contains all the worst elements of human rights violations. It involves the purchase and sale of human beings, coercion, the uprooting of women and children frequently from their countries of origin and from their culture, sometimes the torture of both, often the medical violation of both, and, more often than we know, the death of both. The reproductive exploitation of women and children, along with their sexual exploitation, is an act of total denigration of human beings. Until we recognize such sexual, reproductive, and medical practices as violations of human rights and abolish the overall structure of this international trafficking in women and children, nothing will change.

-Janice G. Raymond, Women as Wombs

[jadepresentingnipples]

Apparently the way to make me write about my OCs is to get me distracted while writing explanations for my choices on a survey in the tags.

[jbfly46]

Ironically, female fears of The Handmaid’s Tale-esque breeding farms is a poor extrapolation of the medical industry farming fetal tissue.

[nebulousnonsense]

looking for a paper to present at journal club next week and I found something that aligns perfectly with my research except I read it and it is evidence against my own hypothesis :( epic science moment

[three--rings]

In case you are not aware, all the most up to date research REJECTS to commonly held medical belief for decades that endometriosis is the uterine lining that somehow "backflows" outside the uterus during menstruation. It's NOT. Many doctors still think this is true and will tell you that's what endo is.

IT ISN'T.

The causes are not understood (yet) but hormonal treatments are not a cure, despite that being what most doctors want to order. Endometriosis lesions can occur ANYWHERE in the body. The only currently known treatment for endo is surgical excision (not ablation. Ablation doesn't remove the tissue and it just regrows.) Only a very few doctors are expert enough to actually excise the lesions and that's why doctors don't offer this as a treatment, cause admitting they can't treat something is something they hate.

Hopefully this new research leads somewhere, but please with this disease the level of knowledge in medical practitioners is garbage. You have to educate and advocate for yourself. If your doctor tells you you have endo and it's uterine lining tissue that has deposited outside the uterus, tell them they need to educate themselves on current medical research.

See this website for papers, lists of expert doctors, and patient education groups. https://nancysnookendo.com/

One of the reasons research is finally being done on endo is because of activism from patients who have been radicalized by decades of pain and no effective treatment.

are we on the cusp of a breakthrough in endometriosis?

[trendingnewsmania]

ESTEFANO ISAIAS SR. AND JR. AND THEIR FETAL TISSUE COMPANIES SUFFER LEGAL SETBACKS

A father, son and their two Yorba Linda companies suffered some recent setbacks in Orange County Superior Court, where they are fighting charges of illegally selling hundreds of fetal tissue products for profit and treating human parts as commodities.

A judge on Friday overruled an attempt by defendants Estefano Isaías Sr. and Estefano Isaías Jr. to be dismissed from the case filed against them by the Orange County District Attorney’s office.

The OCDA in October filed a complaint that alleges DaVinci Biosciences and DV Biologics have engaged in unfair, unlawful and fraudulent business practices. The action seeks to stop the Isaías’ companies from selling fetal tissue and cells, make them pay restitution to those harmed (to be determined at trial) and to pay any other civil penalties a court imposes, District Attorney Tony Rackauckas previously announced at a press conference.

The DA insisted at the time that the case is not about abortion but businesses and their owners allegedly breaking the law.

The judge ruled against a demurrer or written response to the OCDA complaint that claimed the allegations against the Isaíases were ambiguous and too unspecific to substantiate legal action against them as individuals.

The complaint alleges the California Franchise Tax Board forfeited DV Biologics and DaVinci Biosciences’ powers, rights, and privileges in November 2014 and July 2015, respectively, due to failure to pay the required taxes and fees to transact business in the state.

David Daleiden, founder of the Irvine-based anti-abortion group Center of Medical Progress, created controversial undercover videos that connected DaVinci Biosciences, DV Biologics and Planned Parenthood of Orange and San Bernardino Counties in March 2016. At the press conference that following October, Rackauckas said there was no evidence to support Daleiden’s claim that the companies exchanged money with Planned Parenthood or that Planned Parenthood did anything unlawful.

State and federal law prevents selling or profiting off of bodily tissues, but in 2009 DaVinci Biosciences started selling products derived from the cells and tissues they were collecting, processing, storing and using for research purposes, and DV Biologics began marketing the revenue-generating services, according to the DA’s complaint.

The two companies advertised prices: as low as $40 a vial for the “total RNA” [ribonucleic acid] cells from several fetal tissue sources to as high as $1,100 a vial for specific cells derived from fetal brain tissue; from $300 to $375 a vial for fetal lung derived products; $300-$450 a vial for fetal kidney derived products; $500-$700 a vial for fetal heart derived products; and $250-$700 a vial for fetal liver derived products, the OCDA alleges.

Between 2009 and 2011, the companies nearly tripled sales revenues and by the end of 2011 they unlawfully sold fetal-derived tissues and cells harvested in the U.S. to Japan, China, Singapore, Korea, Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Australia, Netherlands, Canada and the United Kingdom, according to the complaint, which adds that by 2012, they had more than 500 products in their inventory that they valued at more than $4.4 million.

The Orange County case against the two companies became a presidential campaign issue when political conservatives and anti-abortion activists connected the Isaías family to Hillary Clinton, who is, of course, a staunch supporter of a woman’s right to choose. Various members of the family—which is based mostly in Miami, Florida, but originally hails from Ecuador—have lavished Clinton with hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions.

Before the Democrat’s stunning defeat in November, the Clinton foes pointed to a 2014 New York Times story that reported while she was Secretary of State, her State Department requested lifting a ban on Luis Isaías’ sister Estefanía entering the country. She had been barred from coming to the U.S. after being caught fraudulently obtaining visas for her maids.

Roberto Isaías, Luis and Estefania’s father, and their uncle William are fugitives from justice in their home country, whose government blames them for the collapse of their bank Filanbanco, which had for many years been the country’s leading banking institution. It collapsed after it was nationalized in 2001, something the government blames on the Isaíases and vice versa.

While in the U.S., the family has diversified into real estate, bioscience and telecommunications. Having owned television networks in Ecuador (that the government also eventually took over), Isaíases now own Miami-based Wreal LLC, which counts among its companies Fyre TV. In 2009, then-CEO Estefano Isaías Jr. envisioned Fyre TV would become “the Netflix of porn.��� Can a title about being screwed by a prosecutor be far behind?

[poptartbunny]

With the 2024 elections approaching I wanted to share 2 stories about abortion and women’s healthcare. One is mine, and the other belongs to a woman named Amber Thurman.

On September 5th, I received the worst news of my life. I learned that I had had a missed miscarriage which meant that I had lost the child I was carrying but my body thought it was still pregnant.

The doctor told me my body should realize what had happened naturally.

Unfortunately it did not.

Eventually the doctor, worried for my safety, prescribed several pills which were supposed to induce a chemical abortion.

Unfortunately it did not and most of the fetal tissue remained inside my body.

This put me at serious risk of sepsis and further complications that could potentially have cost me my life. I scheduled a fairly routine surgery called a D&C to remove the remaining tissue removed and began trying to rebuild my life.

Amber Thurman was a young woman who lived in Georgia with a 6 year old son and a promising future.

She also took pills to chemically induce a abortion that failed to remove all of the fetal tissue and put her at serious risk of sepsis and further complications.

Unfortunately, after the Supreme Court repealed Roe v. Wade, Georgia passed laws prohibiting Amber and other women from having a D&C. As a result, doctors were too afraid to operate on her until her organs were already failing.

She did not survive.

4 years ago I also lived in Georgia. Which means if my husband and I hadn’t moved I likely would not have survived either.

Women’s healthcare is important and access to these procedures save lives, mine included. As you prepare to vote please remember my story and the story of Amber Thurman and vote for the candidate who believes we should be saved.

[odinsblog]

In her final hours, Amber Nicole Thurman suffered from a grave infection that her suburban Atlanta hospital was well-equipped to treat.

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.

Thurman waited in pain in a hospital bed, worried about what would happen to her 6-year-old son, as doctors monitored her infection spreading, her blood pressure sinking and her organs beginning to fail.

It took 20 hours for doctors to finally operate. By then, it was too late.

(continue reading)

[ellecdc]

Yaaay:D

That poly moonwater sickfic was so sweet- maybe you could write a sequel where one (or both) of the boys get sick from when they were helping care for you <3

I love these little requests from all the way back in May - it's like a little treasure trove. Also, I wrote this while currently sick and tired (both in the literal sense) so I'm not actually sure how this turned out; it took me a really long time to manage what I got so I apologize for inconsistencies or just all around poor writing <3

poly!moonwater x fem!reader who got Reg sick [1k words]

CW: sick fic, fluff, Remus being The Worst™ [positive and affectionate], my potentially poor writing

You scrunched your eyes closed and threw your head back rather roughly against the sofa; arms that were holding your book falling limp into your lap.

Remus - less theatrical - did not throw his head back nor did he let his book fall into his lap, but he too scrunched his eyes shut with an equally exasperated scrunch of his nose. 

“Who gave him that thing?” You grumbled as you tucked a bookmark in to save your page and made to stand.

“Do you want me to go, dove?” He offered softly, giving you a sympathetic look when he caught you by the wrist as you made to walk past him. 

“No.” You grumbled rather petulantly, kissing the space between his brows when they furrowed further in sympathy. “It’s my fault, I’ll go.”

Remus smiled at you before pursing his lips in ask which you quickly answered by placing a kiss there, too. “I hardly think you did this on purpose.”

The - now ear splitting - sound of the bell ringing again interrupted your moment as you let out a sigh.

“No,” you agreed, “I certainly didn’t do this on purpose.” 

You poked your head into the bedroom to see Regulus much in the same way you left him, curled up in the fetal position under a mountain of blankets, though his hand was currently poking out of said blankets with his bell held tightly in his grasp.

“Hey bubs.” You offered gently; knowing that for as nettlesome as you currently found him, you really had sort of done this to him. “How’re you feeling?”

“Awful.” He muttered, barely putting any effort into aiming as he tossed the bell back in the direction of the bedside table.

You made a sympathetic humming sound as you perched on the edge of the bed and pushed some of his curls away from his forehead. “What can I do for you?”

“Can I have more meds?” He whimpered, voice awfully small as if he already knew the answer but was hoping to elicit some compassion.

You grimaced as you looked at the clock sitting beside balled up tissues, the damned bell you’d supplied him with, a glass half full of water with a pitcher next to it, and some lozenges. “I’m sorry, my love; it’s not been long enough.”

Your response was met with a petulant whine, a body burrowing further into the blankets, and a hand slithering into yours. 

“How about I rub some more vaporub on your chest, hm?” You asked, beginning to pull away without waiting for an answer, only for his hand to tighten on yours.

“Can you just sit here with me?” 

You cooed almost embarrassingly as you settled more comfortably beside him, one hand holding his as the other raked through his hair, “of course” falling so easily from your lips when he looked so young, so vulnerable, and so innocent with his pink flushed cheeks and glassy eyes no doubt from the pressure in his sinuses. 

“I’ve been terribly troublesome, haven’t I?” He asked a few moments later, startling you when you thought he’d been drifting off.

“No, darling.” You denied, though he lifted his head slightly so he could give you a disbelieving look. “You’ve not been terribly troublesome.” You amended, earning you an almost snort of laughter that quickly dissolved into a coughing fit. 

You helped him sit up and passed him his glass of water.

“You’re so nice to me.” He whispered as if the feeling of your lips against his temple was a foreign concept. You tried to quell your smile as you pressed another kiss to his fever warmed skin.

“I’m really not, bubs. I did this to you, remember?”

You were met with silence as Regulus’ eyes darted around your face. “You’re so mean to me.” 

“Awe Reg, come on now.” Remus sounded from the door as he walked in with a cup of tea in one hand and a damp cloth in the other. “You don’t mean that.”

“Don’t tell me what I do and don’t mean.” Regulus harrumphed, though his ire was quickly undermined as he made grabby hands for the cup of tea. 

“If Remus catches this next, this flu will have had an almost month-long stint in this house.” You mused as Regulus drank his tea.

“I don’t get sick.” Remus offered nonchalantly with a casual shrug of his shoulders.

“What do you mean you don’t get sick.” Regulus all but sneered as he glowered at his perfectly healthy boyfriend over the rim of his tea cup. 

“I don’t get sick.” Remus repeated. “It’s like the universe has decided I’ve got enough shite to deal with, my immune system’s just not one of them.”

Both you and Regulus blinked at him with varying levels of jealousy whilst he brushed lint off the sleeve of his arm. 

“Well isn’t that just fucking dandy for you.” You spat eventually, causing Regulus to nearly spit out his tea in laughter as Remus’ mouth fell open in faux offence. 

“You minx.” He accused you. “I’m in here helping you help your boyfriend-”

“My boyfriend!?” You squealed.

“-who you got sick. I think you should be rather grateful.” 

“Grateful.” You scoffed as you turned to look at Regulus like ‘can you believe this guy?’. 

“I’m grateful for you, Rem.” Regulus let out with a sigh as he handed Remus the cup of tea back and moved to recline against his pillows - that you’d fluffed to perfection for him - with Remus’ damp cloth on his forehead. 

“Okay, well, since you’re all so well taken care of up here.” You teased as you made to stand, Regulus circling his hand around your wrist as Remus made a protesting squawk before you were being manhandled into his lap, though your hand remained safely in Regulus’. 

“No.” Remus murmured into your neck. “We need you to nurse us back to health.”

“I thought you don’t get sick.” You accused.

“I don’t, but I find myself deficient in vitamin you.”

Both you and Regulus groaned as you tried to wriggle yourself free from Remus’ grasp and Regulus buried his head under the blankets. 

“Both of you out, all this corny flirting is making me nauseous again.” Regulus grumbled.

“Well, you heard the man.” Remus stage whispered quickly before he was all but shoving you out of the room. “Feel better bubs! You know where to find us!”

“Yeah, yeah.” Regulus called. “I’ll just ring the sodding bell.”

“You should have never given him that bell, dove.”

[incognitopolls]

Photo under the cut for slightly gross (but not gory) mouth anatomy.

The fimbriated fold of tongue, which is a fold of the mucous membrane under your tongue, sometimes has these little fringes– they're normal tissue left over from fetal development.

[Photo ID under read more: a close-up side view of a white person's open mouth, with their tongue sticking out and up. Along each the two ridges on the underside of the tongue, there is a row of fringe-like growths the same pink color as the tongue, ranging from approximately 2–5mm. They vaguely resemble small tentacles or roots. End ID.]

–

We ask your questions so you don’t have to! Submit your questions to have them posted anonymously as polls.

[kcinpa]

TL;DR Project 2025

Project 2025 has crossed my dash several times, so maybe tumblr is already informed about the hellish 900-page takeover plan if Trump wins office again. But even the articles covering Project 2025 can be a LOT of reading. So I'm trying to get it down to simple bulleted lists…

Navigator Research (a progressive polling outfit) found that 7 in 10 Americans are unfamiliar with Project 2025. But the more they learn about it, the more they don't like or want it. When asked about a series of policy plans taken directly from Project 2025, the bipartisan survey group responded most negatively to the following:

Allowing employers to stop paying hourly workers overtime

Allowing the government to monitor people’s pregnancies to potentially prosecute them if they miscarry

Removing health care protections for people with pre-existing conditions

Eliminating the National Weather Service, which is currently responsible for preparing for extreme weather events like heat waves, floods, and wildfires

Eliminating the Head Start program, ending preschool education for the children of low-income families

Putting a new tax on health insurance for millions of people who get insurance through their employer

Banning Medicare from negotiating for lower prescription drug costs and eliminating the $35 monthly cap on the price of insulin for seniors

Cutting Social Security benefits by raising the retirement age

Allowing employers to deny workers access to birth control

Laurie Garrett looked at the roughly 50 pages within Project 2025 that deal with Health and Human Services (HHS) and other health agencies, and summarized them on Twitter/X in a series of replies. I've shortened even more here:

HHS must "respect for the sacred rights of conscience" for Federal workers & healthcare providers and workers broadly who object to abortions, contraception, gender reassignment & other issues - ie. allow them to deny services based on religious beliefs

HHS should promote "stable and flourishing married families."

Require all welfare programs to "promote father involvement" – or terminate their funding for mothers and children.

Prioritize adoptions via faith-based organizations.

Redefine sex, eliminating all forms of gender "confusion" regarding identity and orientation.

Eliminate the Head Start program for children, entirely

Ban all funding of Planned Parenthood

Ban birth control services that are "egregious attacks on many Americans' religious & moral beliefs"

Deny pregnancy termination pills, "mail-order abortions."

Eliminate Office of Refugee Resettlement; move all refugee matters to the Department of Homeland Security

Healthcare should be "market-based"

Ban all mask and vaccine requirements.

Closely regulate the NIH w/citizen ethics panels, ensuring that no research involves fetal tissue, leads to development of new forms of Abortions or brings profits to the researchers.

Redirect the Office of Global Affairs to promoting "moral conscience" & full compliance w/the Mexico City policy

The CDC should have no role in medical policies.

"Because liberal states have now become sanctuaries for abortion tourism," HHS should use every available tool, including the cutting of funds, to ensure that every state reports exactly how many abortions take place within its borders, at what gestational age of the child, for what reason, the mother’s state of residence & by what method.

I'm still looking for a good short summary of the environmental horrors that Project 2025 would bring if it comes to fruition…

[lets-steal-an-archive]

Under the six-week ban, providers could not perform abortions if they detected fetal cardiac activity, which emerges at about six weeks into pregnancy. Many women, McBurney wrote, do not even know they are pregnant at six weeks.

“For these women, the liberty of privacy means that they alone should choose whether they serve as human incubators for the five months leading up to viability,” McBurney wrote. “It is not for a legislator, a judge, or a commander from The Handmaid’s Tale to tell these women what to do with their bodies during this period when the fetus cannot survive outside the womb any more so than society could – or should – force them to serve as a human tissue bank or to give up a kidney for the benefit of another.”

In a footnote, McBurney added: “There is an uncomfortable and usually unspoken subtext of involuntary servitude swirling about this debate, symbolically illustrated by the composition of the legal teams in this case. It is generally men who promote and defend laws like the Life Act, the effect of which is to require only women – and, given the socio-economic and demographic evidence presented at trial, primarily poor women, which means in Georgia primarily black and brown women – to engage in compulsory labor, ie, the carrying of a pregnancy to term at the government’s behest.”

[secularprolifeconspectus]

BREAKING: new records expose that Planned Parenthood will sell body parts from healthy, viable babies to universities for intellectual property.

In a batch of freshly released FOIA documents, journalist David Daleiden of the Center for Medical Progress has pieced together a horrifying reality: Planned Parenthood harvests organs from viable, nonanomalous fetuses with documented heartbeats from abortions with labor induction for research at the University of California San Diego in exchange for IP rights. In other words, PP dissects healthy premies who are old enough to live outside the womb after making sure they are alive and delivering them intact, per their contract with UCSD, in which PP gets to keep all royalties for patents developed from experiments. And the Spanish-speaking mothers didn't give informed consent to this. In other words, and they prey on vulnerable minorities for their babies.

How do I know this is true? It's because I am the associate reporter in this video, and David emailed me the documents to read for myself.

Evidence includes:

Transfer agreement outlining the exchange of fetal tissue for ownership of research IP

Research plan approved by the UCSD Institutional Review Board requesting organ samples from nonanomalous fetuses up to 23 weeks gestation (that's nearly 6 months old; periviability begins at 21 weeks)

Same research plan calling for verification of a heartbeat immediately before the procedure to ensure the fetuses are living (this keeps their tissues fresh; the fetuses cannot be given a feticide to "euthanize" (poison) them before the procedure, because this would contaminate the tissues; this means the fetuses are either bled out or dismembered alive)

Did I mention this plan calls for up to 2,500 samples from 2,500 fetuses?

Email chain discussing the use of heavy doses of misoprostol before abortions after 12.5 weeks (forces labor contractions to deliver the baby — may result in live birth)

Donation consent forms in English which state the tissue may be used commercially, but in Spanish exclude this info entirely (San Diego has a large immigrant population, so this is racist targeting)

No, I cannot say for certain that PP actually did cut up healthy premies. But I am saying, it is documented that they were willing to do so, and that should be enough to cause alarm.

Protecting premature infants is a nonpartisan human rights issue. Everyone should be outraged about this violation of the vulnerable.

I've had folks suggest to me before that this is just a few "bad actors", but they're missing the bigger picture of how the abortion industrial complex enables these crimes. It is a natural outcome of the system, and it must be dismantled. You cannot permit elective abortion without permiting violence against premature infants. Tell your representatives to divest from Big Abortion NOW.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Kavitha Surana at ProPublica:

In her final hours, Amber Nicole Thurman suffered from a grave infection that her suburban Atlanta hospital was well-equipped to treat. 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. Thurman waited in pain in a hospital bed, worried about what would happen to her 6-year-old son, as doctors monitored her infection spreading, her blood pressure sinking and her organs beginning to fail. It took 20 hours for doctors to finally operate. By then, it was too late.

The otherwise healthy 28-year-old medical assistant, who had her sights set on nursing school, should not have died, an official state committee recently concluded.

Tasked with examining pregnancy-related deaths to improve maternal health, the experts, including 10 doctors, deemed hers “preventable” and said the hospital’s delay in performing the critical procedure had a “large” impact on her fatal outcome. Their reviews of individual patient cases are not made public. But ProPublica obtained reports that confirm that at least two women have already died after they couldn’t access legal abortions and timely medical care in their state. There are almost certainly others. Committees like the one in Georgia, set up in each state, often operate with a two-year lag behind the cases they examine, meaning that experts are only now beginning to delve into deaths that took place after the Supreme Court overturned the federal right to abortion.

Thurman’s case marks the first time an abortion-related death, officially deemed “preventable,” is coming to public light. ProPublica will share the story of the second in the coming days. We are also exploring other deaths that have not yet been reviewed but appear to be connected to abortion bans. Doctors warned state legislators women would die if medical procedures sometimes needed to save lives became illegal. Though Republican lawmakers who voted for state bans on abortion say the laws have exceptions to protect the “life of the mother,” medical experts cautioned that the language is not rooted in science and ignores the fast-moving realities of medicine.

The most restrictive state laws, experts predicted, would pit doctors’ fears of prosecution against their patients’ health needs, requiring providers to make sure their patient was inarguably on the brink of death or facing “irreversible” harm when they intervened with procedures like a D&C. “They would feel the need to wait for a higher blood pressure, wait for a higher fever — really got to justify this one — bleed a little bit more,” Dr. Melissa Kottke, an OB-GYN at Emory, warned lawmakers in 2019 during one of the hearings over Georgia’s ban. 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. Georgia’s Department of Public Health, which oversees the state maternal mortality review committee, said it cannot comment on ProPublica’s reporting because the committee’s cases are confidential and protected by federal law.

The availability of D&Cs for both abortions and routine miscarriage care helped save lives after the 1973 Supreme Court ruling in Roe v. Wade, studies show, reducing the rate of maternal deaths for women of color by up to 40% the first year after abortion became legal. But since abortion was banned or restricted in 22 states over the past two years, women in serious danger have been turned away from emergency rooms and told that they needed to be in more peril before doctors could help. Some have been forced to continue high-risk pregnancies that threatened their lives. Those whose pregnancies weren’t even viable have been told they could return when they were “crashing.” Such stories have been at the center of the upcoming presidential election, during which the right to abortion is on the ballot in 10 states.

Thurman, who carried the full load of a single parent, loved being a mother. Every chance she got, she took her son to petting zoos, to pop-up museums and on planned trips, like one to a Florida beach. “The talks I have with my son are everything,” she posted on social media.

But when she learned she was pregnant with twins in the summer of 2022, she quickly decided she needed to preserve her newfound stability, her best friend, Ricaria Baker, told ProPublica. Thurman and her son had recently moved out of her family’s home and into a gated apartment complex with a pool, and she was planning to enroll in nursing school. The timing could not have been worse. On July 20, the day Georgia’s law banning abortion at six weeks went into effect, her pregnancy had just passed that mark, according to records her family shared with ProPublica. Thurman wanted a surgical abortion close to home and held out hope as advocates tried to get the ban paused in court, Baker said. But as her pregnancy progressed to its ninth week, she couldn’t wait any longer. She scheduled a D&C in North Carolina, where abortion at that stage was still legal, and on Aug. 13 woke up at 4 a.m. to make the journey with her best friend.

On their drive, they hit standstill traffic, Baker said. The clinic couldn’t hold Thurman’s spot longer than 15 minutes — it was inundated with women from other states where bans had taken effect. Instead, a clinic employee offered Thurman a two-pill abortion regimen approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, mifepristone and misoprostol. Her pregnancy was well within the standard of care for that treatment. Getting to the clinic had required scheduling a day off from work, finding a babysitter, making up an excuse to borrow a relative’s car and walking through a crowd of anti-abortion protesters. Thurman didn’t want to reschedule, Baker said. At the clinic, Thurman sat through a counseling session in which she was told how to safely take the pills and instructed to go to the emergency room if complications developed. She signed a release saying she understood. She took the first pill there and insisted on driving home before any symptoms started, Baker said. She took the second pill the next day, as directed.

Deaths due to complications from abortion pills are extremely rare. Out of nearly 6 million women who’ve taken mifepristone in the U.S. since 2000, 32 deaths were reported to the FDA through 2022, regardless of whether the drug played a role. Of those, 11 patients developed sepsis. Most of the remaining cases involved intentional and accidental drug overdoses, suicide, homicide and ruptured ectopic pregnancies. Baker and Thurman spoke every day that week. At first, there was only cramping, which Thurman expected. But days after she took the second pill, the pain increased and blood was soaking through more than one pad per hour. If she had lived nearby, the clinic in North Carolina would have performed a D&C for free as soon as she followed up, the executive director told ProPublica. But Thurman was four hours away.

The consequences of draconian abortion bans are being felt, as at least two women in Georgia died over being denied emergency medical care.