ProPublica’s series was a political effort to create connections where little, if any, exist between maternal mortality and pro-life laws.
ProPublica’s series was a political effort to create connections where little, if any, exist between maternal mortality and pro-life laws.
L ike many Western institutions, the Pulitzers have grown lazy, complacent, and partisan.
Case in point: The supposedly prestigious journalism honor was given to ProPublica last week for a reporting series that can most charitably be described as pro-abortion propaganda.
As if it weren’t bad enough that we’ve handed out Pulitzers for stories that weren’t even real, now we’re rewarding agitprop?
ProPublica took home the 2025 Pulitzer for “Public Service” for its “urgent” coverage of “pregnant women who died after doctors delayed urgently needed care for fear of violating vague ‘life of the mother’ exceptions in states with strict abortion laws.”
ProPublica itself describes the series as “a landmark investigation into the unexamined, irreversible consequences of state abortion bans,” saying, “[We] mined hospital and death records in states whose strict abortion bans threatened physicians with prosecution.”
The group’s statement adds, “From the tragic death of Amber Thurman in Georgia to gutting accounts of women denied lifesaving miscarriage care in Texas, the investigations illuminated the profound human cost of these policies.”
Removing the gloss and focusing on Amber Thurman, we can come right out and say it: The series is a concerted political effort to create connections where little, if any, exist between maternal mortality and pro-life laws.
In the case of Thurman specifically, whose death ProPublica unequivocally lays at the feet of the Supreme Court and Georgia, the facts don’t back the narrative presented by the left-wing–funded news site.
Thurman found out that she was pregnant with twins at six weeks. After the Georgia woman missed an appointment to abort her pregnancy at a facility in North Carolina, the same facility placed her on a prescribed abortion pill regimen of mifepristone and misoprostol. They assured Thurman that the medications were safe. Shortly after she began the regimen, around nine weeks into her pregnancy, Thurman developed sepsis.
After her condition worsened, she went to Piedmont Henry Hospital in Georgia for a dilation and curettage procedure. This is where things get murky. The Atlanta woman was made to wait for roughly 20 hours before being admitted to the operating room. Thurman died shortly thereafter.
This is a story about potential malpractice. It’s a story about the dangers of abortion pills.
Yet the way ProPublica tells it, the parties most responsible for Thurman’s death are Georgia, which passed a six-week fetal heartbeat law in 2022, and the Supreme Court, which overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022 with its Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision. Georgia and the Supreme Court allegedly created an unnavigable legal labyrinth for abortion and health-care providers, forcing risk-averse doctors to opt against providing timely care. The labyrinth is so confusing, according to the picture presented by ProPublica, that, in the case of Thurman specifically, doctors would let a patient die rather than risk running afoul of state law.
At least that’s what you’re led to believe. The ProPublica article never quotes any doctor directly involved in Thurman’s care, nor does it cite any medical professional involved in her treatment as making such allegations. The only people quoted throughout the report in this respect are third-party “experts” who theorize that Dobbs and the heartbeat law probably killed the woman.
A real journalist would have investigated why Thurman was made to wait for 20 hours, not let armchair critics blame Georgia law without also pressing on the specific source of confusion.
Georgia’s abortion law defines abortion specifically as “using, prescribing, or administering any instrument, substance, device, or other means with the purpose to terminate a pregnancy with knowledge that termination will, with reasonable likelihood, cause the death of an unborn child.” However, it also explicitly states that “any such act shall not be considered an abortion if the act is performed with the purpose of: (A) Removing a dead unborn child caused by spontaneous abortion; or (B) Removing an ectopic pregnancy.”
Amazingly, ProPublica’s story includes a section wherein the authors concede, “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.”
In other words, ProPublica has no better idea than you what happened to Thurman. But that doesn’t stop them from assigning blame.
This is how the report begins:
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. It took 20 hours for doctors to finally operate. By then, it was too late.
As Dan McLaughlin explained last year, this was a misrepresentation of Georgia law, which “only prohibits such abortions for a child with ‘a detectable human heartbeat.’” That and other provisions, he wrote, “fortify the clear statutory definition that it is not an abortion to remove from the womb a child who is already dead.”
But, in a move that gave the game away, Democratic lawmakers went on to uphold ProPublica’s reporting as evidence that Congress has a responsibility to act.
Senator Patty Murray (D., Wash.) introduced a resolution seeking to express “the sense of the Senate that every patient has the basic right to emergency health care, including abortion care, regardless of where they live.” In introducing her measure, Murray cited ProPublica’s coverage of Thurman’s death.
Speaking about the Georgia woman, Murray said she lost her life “due to the state’s draconian abortion ban.” She said that Thurman “could have survived” had she “been able to get the health care she needed.”
“These are the consequences of Trump abortion bans,” Murray concluded.
Another Democratic senator, Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, tried to pass a bill that would have used tax dollars to offset the cost of abortion tourism. Like Murray, Baldwin tied her proposal directly to the ProPublica disinformation.
“[We] heard the story of a woman who died because she was denied abortion care until it was too late,” the Wisconsin senator said.
Again, Thurman’s story is about possible malpractice, possible neglect, and the abortion pill. There is, however, scant evidence that state law killed her.
Try telling that to ProPublica.
“We knew early that abortion bans were likely to have deadly consequences for women, and not just those seeking abortions,” the group’s managing editor for the national staff, Tracy Weber, said after they won their Pulitzer.
If I didn’t know any better, I’d say that was a conclusion in search of supporting evidence.
It’s only fitting that ProPublica’s slipshod activism should be honored with an award whose namesake’s most significant contribution to the craft was a series of sensationalized news reports meant to provoke America into war with Spain.
If nothing else, awarding a series designed explicitly to whip up resentment and partisan fervor is exactly in line with the spirit of Joseph Pulitzer.