Trailing in key battleground state, Harris spotlights Georgia woman's death, 'Trump abortion bans'

ATLANTA — Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris brought her campaign to restore abortion rights to Georgia on Friday, following a report that a 28-year-old pregnant woman died in the state after doctors struggled to grapple with new restrictions on abortion.

Georgia, which President Joe Biden narrowly carried in 2020, is a top battleground state that could help decide the 2024 election. Harris is currently running behind former President Donald Trump in most Georgia polls, including a survey from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution this week that found Trump ahead among likely Georgia voters 47%-44%.

Harris said in a speech at the Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre in Atlanta that the death of Amber Thurman two years ago serves as a prime example of the dangerous implications of the Supreme Court's 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade that ended a constitutional right to an abortion.

"We will speak her name – Amber Nicole Thurman," Harris, the vice president, said before a crowd of about 600 supporters, recounting how Thurman hoped to attend nursing school. "She had her future all planned out, and it was her plan."

In unison, the crowd repeated her name: "Amber Nicole Thurman."

ProPublica reported this week that Thurman showed up at a Georgia hospital in 2022 in need of a routine procedure to expel fetal tissue from her uterus because of complications from taking abortion pills. But the doctors hesitated to treat her out of consideration for the state's new abortion law that banned the procedure with few exceptions.

"Amber waited 20 hours – 20 excruciating hours – until finally she was in enough physical distress that her doctors thought they would be OK to treat her. But it was too late. She died of sepsis," Harris said.

Harris has aggressively blamed Trump, the Republican nominee, for Roe v. Wade's demise through his three Supreme Court appointments. Harris said the court's decision opened the door for 20 states to enact what she calls "Trump abortion bans."

During a livestream rally hosted Thursday night by Oprah Winfrey, Harris heard from Shanette Williams, Thurman's mother, who told Harris that her daughter's death was "preventable."

“I promised her, as she has asked, that we will make sure Amber is not just remembered as a statistic,” Harris said. "So that people will know she was a mother and a daughter and a sister, and that she was loved and that she should be alive today."

Harris said "we knew this could happen" when the court overturned Roe v. Wade.

"There is a word preventable, and there is another word, predictable," Harris said. "And the reality is, for every story we hear of the suffering under Trump abortion bans, there are so many other stories we're not hearing where suffering is happening every day in our country."

Reach Joey Garrison on X, formerly Twitter, @joeygarrison.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Harris rips Trump in Georgia over abortion law, death of Amber Thurman