Three children without a mother
Pro Publica reports on one pregnancy made fatal by Georgia’s woman-hating law.
Candi Miller’s health was so fragile, doctors warned having another baby could kill her. “They said it was going to be more painful and her body might not be able to withstand it,” her sister, Turiya Tomlin-Randall, told ProPublica.
But when the mother of three realized she had unintentionally gotten pregnant in the fall of 2022, Georgia’s new abortion ban gave her no choice. Although it made exceptions for acute, life-threatening emergencies, it didn’t account for chronic conditions, even those known to present lethal risks later in pregnancy.
At 41, Miller had lupus, diabetes and hypertension and didn’t want to wait until the situation became dire. So she avoided doctors and navigated an abortion on her own — a path many health experts feared would increase risks when women in America lost the constitutional right to obtain legal, medically supervised abortions.
Miller ordered abortion pills online, but she did not expel all the fetal tissue and would need a dilation and curettage procedure to clear it from her uterus and stave off sepsis, a grave and painful infection. In many states, this care, known as a D&C, is routine for both abortions and miscarriages. In Georgia, performing it had recently been made a felony, with few exceptions.
It’s Savita Halappanavar all over again.
I remember from my childhood in the early 1960s my mother and aunts talking about having a D&C; I got the impression that it (whatever it was) was just something women had done occasionally. They jokingly called it a “Dusting and Cleaning”. I hadn’t heard or thought much about it since until it became a crime.
My mother nearly died from her sixth pregnancy because her doctor was Catholic, and refused to tie her tubes or give her contraception. I would have loved to be there when he chewed her out for getting pregnant again; my mother had a strong temper and a strong tongue to go with it. He tied her tubes after that pregnancy.
This was in 1970; abortion was not yet legalized, but contraception was, at least for married women.
The mational Medical Establishments, country by country, have wheedled their way into the delightful marketing position in which they both set their own fees-for-service; and control entry into their professsion (ie who can go into business. termed ‘ practice.’) This induced the champion free-marketeer and ‘economic rationalist’ Milton Friedman to refer to it as ‘the doctors’ racket’ in his book Free to Choose. Their Medical Establishment voices are muted on the subject of womens’ right to legal, medically-supervised and provided abortion.