Shanette Williams, who is the mother of Amber Nicole Thurman, speaks outside the state Capitol on Thursday. Jill Nolin/Georgia Recorder
Shanette Williams is again calling on state lawmakers to repeal Georgia’s six-week abortion ban that she says led to her 28-year-old daughter’s death shortly after the law took effect in 2022.
Williams, who is the mother of Amber Nicole Thurman, found a national platform for her message last year when she joined the campaign trail with then Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris.
But as Williams’ voice emanated from Liberty Plaza Thursday, it marked her first time since her daughter’s death was first reported by ProPublica last fall that Williams has brought her family’s story of loss to the doorstep of the state Capitol. When the U.S. Supreme Court ended the federal right to terminate a pregnancy in 2022, the ruling left it to legislatures to regulate access.
“Today I am here, and I will continue to speak her name, I will continue to be wherever I need to be, so that this will not happen to another woman,” Williams said at an event organized by advocates for reproductive rights.
Williams told reporters Thursday that she is pressing lawmakers to repeal the six-week ban.
“Is it going to bring my daughter back? Nothing will bring her back. Is it going to ease the pain? Absolutely not,” she said. “We have suffered. So, to hear them say, we retract that decision. It won’t bring her back, but it’ll save other lives.”
Thurman died after attempting to terminate her pregnancy using abortion medication from a clinic in North Carolina. But when she experienced a rare complication and went to an Atlanta-area hospital for treatment, the doctors waited 20 hours to perform a dilation and curettage, or D&C, to treat sepsis that resulted from an incomplete abortion.
Thurman’s death was one of two in late 2022 that were deemed preventable by the state’s Maternal Mortality Review Committee.
The state dismissed all members from the committee in November when the Georgia Department of Public Health was unable to identify who provided the information to ProPublica, saying “confidential information provided to the Maternal Mortality Review Committee was inappropriately shared with outside individuals.”
Williams blasted that decision Thursday.
“For the person that said, ‘I’m going to let the journalist know that my daughter’s death was preventable,’ I will never know your name, but I say thank you,” Williams said. “And what does it say about the state of Georgia to actually fire a board because somebody leaked that information, to get an entirely new board? It makes no sense.”
Rep. Sharon Cooper, a Marietta Republican who chairs the House Public and Community Health Committee, earlier this month defended that decision during a debate on a bill related to the committee that investigates maternal deaths in Georgia.
“Is it not true that the reason we had to have a new committee is that when you are dealing with this type of death, it is imperative that information about the death is not shared with anyone except members of that committee,” Cooper said from the House floor.
Cooper said the new review committee had recently started meeting again.
Revelations about the deaths of two Georgia women became national news and reignited the debate over the state’s abortion restrictions that took effect in 2022. Their deaths also put a new focus on an exception in the law that purports to protect mothers when their own health is imperiled.
Rep. Robert Flournoy, a Hampton Democrat and a pastor who presided over Thurman’s funeral service, said he believes state lawmakers should at a minimum explore whether Georgia’s law needs to be clarified to prevent a similar tragedy.
“The struggle won’t stop. We’re going to continue to make sure that we fight, continue to make sure that we speak with others to try to see what we get done for women’s rights,” the freshman lawmaker said.
There has been little appetite for revisiting Georgia’s law while it is tied up in court. The case had been set for oral arguments this month before the state Supreme Court before it was sent back to the trial court in Fulton County.
Republicans have, however, been eager to support a proposal to protect access to in-vitro fertilization after the Alabama Supreme Court last year ruled that frozen embryos were children and parents could claim civil damages for their destruction. That bill easily cleared the House last month and is now awaiting action in the Senate.
House lawmakers also passed two other fertility-related bills Thursday. One of them would require insurers to cover fertility preservation services for patients with cancer, sickle cell disease or lupus, and another would authorize certified nurse practitioners and physician assistants to perform artificial dissemination.
But advocates for reproductive rights are pressing state lawmakers to do more.
“There have been some bills introduced in the Legislature that seek to enshrine the right to IVF and to have insurance coverage for certain conditions for fertility preservation. These bills do not do enough,” said Agbo Ikor, policy and advocacy director at SPARK Reproductive Justice NOW.
GET THE MORNING HEADLINES.