Kamala Goes on Sex Podcast to Lie about Georgia Abortion Law

Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks, a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we dig into Kamala Harris’s telling of the tragic story of young mother Amber Thurman, and we cover more media misses.

Harris, Walz Lie About Amber Thurman’s Death for Political Gain

The latest stop on Kamala Harris’s friendly media tour was sex podcast Call Her Daddy, where she was allowed to spread unchecked falsehoods about the death of 28-year-old Atlanta native Amber Thurman, who died in 2022 after complications from a chemical abortion. The show is hosted by Alex Cooper, who got her start telling graphic stories about her sex life on a Barstool Sports podcast but has since tried to reinvent herself as a serious interviewer after securing a lucrative deal from Spotify.

Cooper introduced Thurman’s story, claiming she “died in Georgia because the abortion bans in that state the doctors were too afraid to treat her.”

Harris added that Thurman was the mother of a six-year-old son, and was also a medical assistant excited to have just gotten onto her feet financially and to have been accepted to nursing school.

“She was pregnant and she didn’t want to go through with her pregnancy and she was living in Georgia and she couldn’t receive care there because she was past six weeks and so she ended up going to another state,” Harris said. Cooper went on to ask Harris whether she was aware of any laws that gave the government control over men’s bodies. Harris, apparently unfamiliar with the military draft, was stumped.

It was a story in ProPublica that first brought Thurman’s death to national prominence. The story explains that Thurman was nine weeks pregnant with twins in August 2022 when she made an appointment at a North Carolina clinic for a surgical abortion. But after she arrived at her appointment late, she was given the chemical-abortion pills mifepristone and misoprostol instead.

Thurman returned home where she experienced complications in the days that followed. After passing out, Thurman was taken to a local hospital where she presented with a tender abdomen. Doctors discovered a foul odor during a pelvic exam.

After 20 hours, she was diagnosed with acute severe sepsis and brought in for dilation and cuttage (D&C) but she ultimately died.

According to the ProPublica article, Georgia had “criminalized” the D&C procedure “with few exceptions,” suggesting this led to the delay in Thurman’s care. In fact, the title of the article, which was published last month, says as much: “Abortion Bans Have Delayed Emergency Medical Care. In Georgia, Experts Say This Mother’s Death Was Preventable.”

Yet deep, deep into the story, the writer acknowledges that it is “not clear from the records available why doctors waited to provide a D&C to Thurman.”

But that didn’t stop Harris from choosing to make the tragedy a political flashpoint.

“She was bleeding and they delayed 20 hours before they treated her because here’s the thing that’s so messed up about this: Some of these people will say ‘Whoa, but I do believe in exceptions, I do believe that there should be an exception in terms of the life of the mother.’ Let’s talk about this. This gets back to, again, practical application of policy. Okay, so you believe that there’s an exception that the person should receive abortion care if the life of the mother is at risk? You know what that means in practical terms? She’s almost dead before you decide to give her care.”

However, state law allows for immediate treatment “when a physician determines, in reasonable medical judgment, that a medical emergency exists” or that the “pregnancy is medically futile.”

And in Thurman’s case, abortion law would not have applied, because her unborn children were already dead. Abortion is defined by state law as an act intended to “cause the death of an unborn child” when a “detectable human heartbeat” is present.

In fact, an attorney for the Thurman family has said it was not the Georgia law that led to Thurman’s death, but instead the alleged malpractice of the hospital.

“Even under Georgia law, the doctors had a duty to act to save Amber,” said attorney Ben Crump. “She had taken the abortion pills and there were tissues left. There was no viable fetus or anything that would have prevented them from saving her life while she suffered.”

“You have a duty to stabilize her and then give her the option to go to another hospital facility,” the high-profile civil-rights attorney added. “But you cannot let her suffer and die on your hospital bed when the death is preventable.”

And as a recent Wall Street Journal opinion essay notes, a Medicare rating of the hospital where Thurman died shows only 41 percent of patients with severe sepsis or septic shock “received appropriate care,” a finding that is 20 points below the national average.

Of course it comes as little surprise that pro-abortion activists have chosen to misrepresent the facts of the case, rather than to admit the obvious: that chemical abortion is not as safe as they have claimed.

Harris’s running mate, Minnesota governor Tim Walz, has been similarly guilty of misrepresenting Thurman’s story both during the recent vice-presidential debate and during an interview with Fox News.

During the debate, Walz said Thurman “had to travel a long distance to North Carolina to try and get her care” because Georgia prohibits abortion after six weeks. “Amber Thurman died in that journey back and forth,” he claimed.

And during an appearance on Fox News, Walz falsely said Trump is calling for a nationwide abortion ban, despite the former president having spoken repeatedly in favor of states having the power to set their own abortion laws.

“They might see this as an election issue, but we see this as a woman’s right to make her own bodily decisions,” Walz said. “That’s why states like mine have the ability to protect that right. States like Georgia force women to cross state lines, and then we have a death like Amber Thurman’s. So let’s be very clear: trying to cut hairs on an issue like this is not where the American public stands. They want the restoration of Roe v. Wade, and Vice President Harris has said that’s what we would do.”

He was then fact-checked by anchor Shannon Bream, who pointed to the Thurman family attorney’s statements.

“Her own attorney said it wasn’t the Georgia law, it was the hospital’s — what he claims is — malpractice, not treating her when she clearly showed up in distress and still had the byproducts of her pregnancy because of that rare complication from the abortion pill. So just to be clear on the Georgia law and how her family and her attorney see it,” she said.

But Walz doubled down. “I think they also indicated that had she not gone to North Carolina after the debate the other night that she would have been in a better position. So, look. These are the situations you’re going to get into when you take this decision and put it into the hands of politicians like Donald Trump rather than women and their doctors. We trust women, we trust doctors and we know the outcomes of that are better.”

Headline Fail of the Week

“Tim Walz has a tendency to misspeak. It may haunt the campaign,” Politico reports, in an astonishing act of spin on the Minnesota governor’s behalf.

“Since being tapped as Kamala Harris’ running mate, the folksy, plain-speaking Minnesota governor has had to explain a growing number of inaccurate statements — and at times embellishments — about his past. They range from comments about his military service to his visit to Hong Kong more than three decades ago to clarifying that his family didn’t specifically use in vitro fertilization,” the story explains.

It’s hard to imagine Politico describing these lies as simply examples of misspeaking if they had been spoken by former president Donald Trump, Senator J. D. Vance, or anyone else on the right.

Media Misses

• In a measure of how out-of-touch the New York Times can be, the paper published an article in which a pair of food photographers take their six-year-old son to Paris because he hates eggs and they wanted to see if a dozen French chefs could change that.

• Politico offered laughable debate analysis based on “eight body language tells” from Walz and Vance. Among the most, well, eye-popping examples: “When Walz felt especially passionate about something, he’d open his eyes wide as saucers. Eye-popping can sometimes be a sign of surprise, but for Walz, it simply revealed his emotional intensity — like this moment during an exchange about abortion.”

• 19th News offered a list of Hurricane Helene resources with an unusual focus:

See more

We put together a list of resources @19th
for those looking to donate in the wake of Hurricane Helene.

We focused on mutual aid groups and organizations on the ground that are helping LGBTQ+ people and people seeking an abortion. https://t.co/fgAz085QAo

— Jessica Kutz (@jkutzie) September 30, 2024