Vice President Kamala Harris and Oprah Winfrey brought the family of the late Amber Nicole Thurman to a staged town hall meeting in which they speculated that she died because of Georgia’s six-week abortion law.
As Breitbart News’ Katherine Hamilton noted, and David Harsanyi of The Federalist observed, the liberal outlet ProPublica published a story in which it attributed Thurman’s death to the abortion law, without direct evidence.
Thurman suffered an infection as the result of an abortion through pills in which some fetal tissue remained in her uterus. Her death was ruled “preventable,” but ProPublica speculated further, without actual documentary evidence, that it was the result of doctors delaying a procedure called dilation and curettage (D&C).
ProPublica’s Kavitha Surana claimed, incorrectly, that a P&C was illegal under the circumstances. She admitted — deep into the article — that it was “not clear from the records available why doctors waited to provide a D&C.”
Yet that has not stopped ProPublica, and the Harris campaign, from claiming that Thurman’s death was a consequence of the Georgia law, and in turn the fault of former President Donald Trump, who nominated conservative Supreme Court justices who overturned the Roe v. Wade precedent and allowed states to make their own decisions on abortion law.
At a campaign event in Farmington Hills, Michigan, Oprah Winfrey presented the Thurman family, and told the story of Amber Thurman’s death as if the theory proposed by ProPublica were true: that the Georgia law was responsible (at 1:02:33 below):
In presenting the Thurman case, Opray Winfrey strongly implied — but did not explicitly state — that doctors delayed performing the D&C procedure because of the abortion law.
Thurman’s grieving family spoke, expressing outrage at her death, speculating about the culpability of the six-week abortion ban, as members of the audience wept.
Winfrey noted that they had “just recently learned” about how Amber Thurman died. She also confirmed that the ProPublica article had been the only source for the claim that Thurman’s death was related to Georgia’s abortion law.
Kamala Harris praised the “courage” of the family, and drove the message home, blaming the reversal of Roe v. Wade for state abortion bans, calling them a national healthcare crisis.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days, available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
