By Kayla Bartsch
Tuesday, May 06, 2025
Yesterday, the Pulitzer Prize board announced its
2025 winners.
In the category of “Public Service,” ProPublica won
the coveted prize for its series
titled “Life of the Mother: How Abortion Bans Lead to Preventable Deaths.”
National Review has doggedly pointed out the misrepresentations platformed in this series —
misrepresentations stemming from the authors’ evident bias for “abortion
rights.”
The Pulitzer Prize Board — which determines the winners
of journalism’s most prestigious award — includes members such as Claire
Shipman, the acting president of Columbia University (who replaced Katrina
Armstrong, who replaced Minouche Shafik); Viet Thanh Nguyen, professor of
American studies and ethnicity at USC and author of Race and Resistance:
Literature and Politics in Asian America; and Ginger Thompson, the managing
editor of ProPublica.
To be clear, the stories covered in ProPublica’s
“Life of the Mother” series are utterly tragic — and we should be
furious that these mothers died preventable deaths.
However, ProPublica — along with virtually every
other mainstream media outlet — contributed to the smoke screen that has
clouded the actual cause of death in ProPublica’s biggest stories: the
cases of Amber Thurman and Candi Miller.
These women did not die because of pro-life legislation.
These women did not die because doctors risked legal persecution if they
intervened. These women died because abortion pills — especially when taken
after the first seven weeks of pregnancy — are incredibly dangerous. One out of
ten women experience a serious adverse event, such as sepsis or hemorrhage, within
45 days of taking mifepristone. While no investigation has been completed, it
also appears that the negligence of their medical providers played a role.
The real story here, which has received little to no
attention in the mainstream media, is how the FDA has slowly but surely removed
most of the original guardrails concerning the administration of the abortion
pill. Now, young mothers are taking the chemical abortifacient regimen of
mifepristone and misoprostol, unaware of its potentially fatal consequences.
As I wrote in the aftermath of Amber Thurman’s tragic death last
year:
The primary cause of her death was
sepsis, a potential side effect of the most common chemical abortifacient — a
regimen of mifepristone and misoprostol. Crucially, the FDA has dramatically
loosened regulations on the drugs in recent years — regulations that would help
keep women safe.
As National Review highlighted last year, the mifepristone-based
chemical-abortion pill RU-486 has become the go-to method of abortion across
the U.S.:
According to the pro-abortion Guttmacher
Institute, medication abortions have increased steadily with each regulatory
shift: The pill was used in 17 percent of all U.S. abortions at the end of the
Bush administration, but that increased to under a third a decade ago, to a
little over half on the eve of the Dobbs decision, and to nearly
two-thirds in 2023.
This growth is connected to these pills’ ease of access
and the litany of progressive NGOs that seek to distribute them to women across the country, no questions
asked.
However, these drugs are known to send women to the emergency room.
A woman who takes abortion pills
late in her pregnancy — anytime after two months — could land in the emergency
room for extensive bleeding, sepsis, or worse. The FDA’s own label for abortion
pills says that approximately one in 25 women who take the drugs will end up in
the emergency room. That likelihood increases with gestational age. Among women
who take abortion pills after 84 days of gestation, nearly 40 percent will
require follow-up surgery, and 4 percent will sustain significant infection.
In its “Life of the Mother” series, ProPublica has
also published several stories attacking failed data-gathering, such as “The CDC Hasn’t Asked States to Track Deaths Linked to Abortion
Bans.” Ironically, pro-lifers have been asking for record-keeping
requirements so that data-gathering bodies can track all the ER visits
connected to side effects of chemical abortifacients. Without these records,
research institutes have had to use other methods to determine the real dangers
of mifepristone. According to a massive study
of nearly 900,000 insurance claims, conducted by the Ethics and Public Policy
Center, “10.93 percent of women experience sepsis, infection, hemorrhaging, or
another serious adverse event within 45 days following a mifepristone
abortion.”
Pro-abortion advocates have religiously held that (1)
chemical abortion is safe and (2) it’s the fault of pro-life legislation when
mothers die from taking it.
In total, ProPublica’s “Life of the Mother” series contains
ten articles that all blame pro-life legislation for preventable deaths. Two
heart-wrenching articles from the series share the stories of Amber Thurman and Candi Miller, mothers who died preventable deaths after
succumbing to fatal side effects of the abortion pill. Two other articles share
the tragic stories of Josseli Barnica and Nevaeh Crain — young women who died from
miscarriage-related sepsis. (Abortifacients did not play a role in their
deaths.)
Regardless of the cause of a miscarriage, all OB-GYN
medical providers are trained on the proper response to ensure that the mother
does not suffer from infection. Every piece of pro-life legislation
distinguishes between a remedial dilation and curettage (D&C) procedure and
an elective surgical abortion. As I have written before, in the case of Amber
Thurman:
A D&C is a standard medical
practice, most often used in the first trimester if a woman suffers an
incomplete miscarriage, to ensure that all fetal remains have been cleared from
the womb. …And even if, somehow, the fetus in Thurman’s infected womb had still
had a heartbeat, the doctors and nurses attending to her would have been
clearly free to perform a D&C on her under Georgia law.
House Bill 481, known as the “Living Infants Fairness and
Equality (LIFE) Act,” states:
(b) No abortion is authorized or
shall be performed if the probable gestational age of the unborn child has been
determined . . . to have a detectable human heartbeat except when:
(1) A physician determines, in
reasonable medical judgment, that a medical emergency exists
(2) The probable gestational age of
the unborn child is 20 weeks or less and the
pregnancy is the result of rape or
incest in which an official police report has been filed alleging the offense
of rape or incest.
(3) A physician determines, in
reasonable medical judgment, that the pregnancy is medically futile.
While pro-life legislation varies state by state, all
share similar clarifications and exemptions to those outlined in Georgia’s LIFE
Act.
Any medical professional who refuses to treat a woman
undergoing a miscarriage, for fear of “breaking” a pro-life law, is
detrimentally misinformed. No doctors or nurses are at risk of being sued by
the state if they care for women. (Rather, they risk a malpractice suit for
negligence.)
If medical professionals are truly refusing to
treat mothers because of misinformation about the content of pro-life
legislation, this is a damning evaluation of the media outlets that misinformed
them.
Amber Thurman, Candi Miller, Josseli Barnica, and Nevaeh
Crain should all have received prompt and lifesaving care from their medical
providers. They didn’t get it.
ProPublica has argued in its series that pro-life
legislation places undue burdens on medical providers, making it hard to
determine when they are allowed to act. This is both false and patronizing. As
Dan McLaughlin has clearly argued, all medical providers operate within a web of rules
and regulations.
Georgia hospitals, like hospitals
all across the country, operate in an Amazonian jungle of laws and regulations,
federal and state, and comply with extensive standards of judge-made tort law.
. . . Hospitals and doctors practice medicine every day knowing that they can
be sued for medical malpractice, sanctioned by the state medical board, or
denied payment by Medicare or Medicaid or private insurance if they fail to
adhere to prevailing medical standards, fail to provide medically necessary
care, provide medically unnecessary care, or provide substandard care. More
than 10,000 medical-malpractice claims are filed in the United States every
year, many of them asserting that doctors failed to do something necessary to
save a life.
Certainly, doctors from organizations such as ACOG, the
American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, are champing at the bit to
claim that pro-life legislation leads to the death of women. However, for an
organization that is dedicated
to abortion advocacy, ACOG has many motivating factors to blame pro-life
legislation for the harms done by dangerous abortifacients or hospital
failures.
While ProPublica enjoys its prize, I hope more
medical providers will not be cowed into fear or negligence by pro-choice
disinformation campaigns.
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