Georgia Fires Entire Committee on Maternal Mortality Over Leaked Report on Abortion Ban Deaths

The heartbreaking story of Amber Thurman was first reported in ProPublica earlier this year

Georgia's top health official, public health commissioner Dr. Kathleen Toomey, has fired every member of the state committee on maternal mortality over leaked stories of women in Georgia who died unnecessarily due to restrictive abortion bans.

The stories of the two women who died, Amber Thurman and Candi Miller, were reported in ProPublica earlier this year. The stories laid bare how women are increasingly put in danger in a healthcare system in Georgia that requires doctors to abandon ethical care to adhere to extremist anti-choice ideologies. 

Toomey said in a letter ⎻ published by ProPublica and dated November 8th, the week of Donald Trump's election ⎻ that whomever leaked the stories from the committee violated confidentiality agreements. 

"Confidential information provided to the Maternal Mortality Review Committee was inappropriately shared with outside individuals," Toomey wrote. "Even though this disclosure was investigated, the investigation was unable to uncover which individual(s) disclosed confidential information."

"Therefore, effective immediately the current MMRC is disbanded, and all member seats will be filled through a new application process."

The move from Toomey, and ultimately from Governor Brian Kemp, will likely have the effect of silencing future committees from being critical of state abortion laws. Every state has maternal mortality review boards whose job is to gather data on deaths of women in childbirth and determine if the circumstances were preventable.

"They did what they were supposed to do. This is why we need them," said Monica Simpson, executive director of SisterSong, one of the groups challenging Georgia’s abortion ban in court. "To have this abrupt disbandment, my concern is what we are going to lose in the process, in terms of time and data?"

Other states with abortion bans like Texas have used similar methods, like disbanding committees and creating duplicate positions, to fill review board seats with anti-abortion activists. One such committee member from Texas, Nakeenya Wilson, was forced to reapply for her position after speaking out against the Texas abortion law, but was not reappointed. 

"What message is being said to the families who lost their loved ones?" Wilson said. "There’s going to be even less accountability for this to not happen again."

Amber Thurman passed away from an infection after she was unable to get an abortion procedure to remove dead fetal tissue from her body. The procedure, a dilation and curettage (D&C), could land a doctor in Georgia in prison for up to ten years in a post-Roe United States. It is a highly common procedure, and her death was labeled preventable by the Georgia MMRC.