In 2022, Amber Nicole Thurman moved to Georgia with her six-year-old son. Hoping to make a better life, she applied to nursing school and that summer she learned she was pregnant again. With twins.
Georgia had just enacted its six-week abortion ban, so Thurman traveled with a friend to North Carolina for a surgical abortion; she was about nine weeks pregnant. When she missed the appointment due to traffic, a clinic employee offered her the abortion pill. Thurman signed documents acknowledging the possible adverse effects of the pill and went home.
On August 18, days after taking the second pill, Thurman started throwing up blood. She was taken to the hospital, where she died on August 19 while doctors were performing a dilation and curettage surgery (D&C) to remove 'retained products of conception.'
She was 28 years old.
Her cause of death was listed as sepsis and those aforementioned 'retained products of conception.'
Several things are clear:
Thurman was able to access an abortion. That chemical abortion was completed without oversight from the medical staff of the clinic that prescribed her the pills or any medical supervision, until she ended up in the hospital.
It appears, at least on the surface, that Georgia healthcare providers dropped the ball in failing to treat Thurman promptly following the abortion. In some ways, it's not their fault. Abortion clinics routinely prescribe medications or provide abortion procedures that go sideways, and then these women are dumped off to other hospitals and medical providers to provide follow-up care and clean up the abortion clinic's mess.
But the reality of the situation didn't stop ProPública from running a factually inaccurate, politically-motivated article on those abortion laws.
And for their lies, they were just awarded the Pulitzer.
NEW YORK (AP) — ProPublica wins 2025 Pulitzer for Public Service for reports on deaths of pregnant women in abortion-restricted states.
— Seung Min Kim (@seungminkim) May 5, 2025
That they call this 'public service' is a slap in the face to women everywhere.
As I reported last week, a recent study has shown the abortion pill -- the chemical abortion Thurman was able to obtain in North Carolina without proper medical supervision -- causes 'severe or life-threatening' complications in almost 11% of women who use them.
You'll note that the story didn't run in ProPublica.
CNN, however, welcomed the Senior Editor of the outlet, Ziva Branstetter, onto their program to continue lying about Georgia's abortion laws. Democrats, including Nancy Pelosi, Elizabeth Warren, and Kamala Harris, used ProPublica's dishonest 'reporting' to attack abortion laws.
Kamala Harris made Amber Nicole Thurman a plank of her campaign platform, and her attempt to make political gains off of the woman's death was so blatant that Thurman's family asked Harris to stop.
Harris did not stop.
And neither will the Democrats.
Because neither they, nor their minions at ProPublica, actually care about Thurman. If they did, they'd start by telling the truth about why she died: complications from an abortion pill that the Democrats want to hand out like candy on Halloween. A pill that will cause one in ten women to suffer 'severe or life-threatening complications.'
Without doctor supervision or managed care. The Federalist just ran a piece about how easy it was for their reporter to find, order, and obtain abortion pills online -- despite those pills being illegal in the state in which the reporter ordered them.
Why didn't ProPublica look into how easy it is to order those pills online (or how easy it would be for that mail order system to be abused)?
We all know why.
If Democrats had their way and anti-abortion laws were overturned tomorrow, women like Thurman would still die. Because the problem is not the anti-abortion laws, but the abortion pill and Democratic fear-mongering that tells women anti-abortion laws will land them (or their medical providers) in prison.
And ProPublica wouldn't run those stories, either. They would be swept under the rug.
Because the truth doesn't win the Pulitzer these days.
But lying and putting women's lives at risk, apparently, does.
