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Vice President Kamala Harris told an Atlanta area audience Friday that “Trump abortion bans” were to blame for the “preventable” deaths of two Georgia women in the news this week, “and those are only the stories we know.”  

Friday’s event in this key state was scheduled just days ago, after ProPublica reported that Amber Nicole Thurman, a 28-year-old nursing assistant and mother of a 6-year-old son, died in August 2022 after doctors at an Atlanta area hospital delayed necessary care due to the state’s six-week abortion ban. On Thursday, Harris met privately with Thurman’s family before she appeared on stage at a live-streamed forum hosted by Oprah Winfrey. Thurman’s mother and sisters were in attendance during the event, with her mother describing the immense pain they feel as their family grapples with Amber’s death. 

Harris’ response to Thurman’s story signals the campaign’s ongoing belief that Georgia is in play and that prioritizing abortion rights and contrasting the stances of Harris and former President Donald Trump on reproductive health is key to winning it. At the Friday event, Harris was surrounded by signs that said “1 in 3 women lives under a Trump abortion ban” on the walls and “Trust Women” on the stage. 

Speaking to the Atlanta audience, Harris told the crowd that today “we will speak her name: Amber Nicole Thurman.” To this, the rapt audience then chanted Thurman’s full name out loud several times, the room overtaken by the unscripted somber call and response. 

Thurman’s story speaks to the larger crisis involving Black women’s maternal mortality rates in the state. Harris, however, did not mention the Black maternal mortality crisis in Georgia outright, though many of the speakers who came before Harris did, directly linking the impact of the state’s abortion ban to Black women’s health care access generally.  

“The word ‘preventable’ — she can’t stop thinking about the word they spoke to her,” Harris said of Thurman’s mother. “I promised her as she has asked that we will make sure that Amber is not just remembered as a statistic. There is a word preventable, and there is another word predictable. And the reality is, for every story we hear of the suffering under the term abortion ban, there are so many stories we’re not hearing.”

California Sen. Laphonza Butler, a co-chair of the Harris-Walz campaign and the only Black woman currently in the Senate, was in attendance at the Atlanta speech. She told The 19th that though Harris did not explicitly mention the Black maternal health crisis in Georgia, it was the heart of her remarks. 

“It was Vice President Harris who brought the issue of maternal health and women and women of color into the White House, and she continues her commitment to this body of work. So what she was focused on today was the individual story of fellow Georgian Amber Thurman,” Butler said. Butler described Georgia as “one of the seven states that the Harris-Walz campaign has been truly building their strategy around.”

“That story was the personification of the Black maternal health crisis, the life of a woman of color who unfortunately experienced what women across this state, and frankly, across this region, have been living with for decades: the disinvestment, the underinvestment in communities all across this region,” she said. 

“Where else could she go to talk about the pains of abortion access and the challenges that women who cannot get the care that they need face” than Thurman’s own home state, Butler asked. “I think this is the place to be, to tell and amplify Amber’s story — but also to call attention to this very same ban that is now moving in Florida, mirroring the exact ban that’s in place here in Georgia. The ban that President Trump has declared he’s going to vote for. He’s going to bring this same thing to the women of Florida.”

Georgia has the worst maternal mortality ratio of any state in the country: Black women are 3.3 times more likely to die from pregnancy-related complications than White women in the state, according to an analysis by the Center for Reproductive Rights.

Butler added that she believes the vice president left clear orders to the audience Friday on what they need to do next: “Leave no vote behind….The marching orders for folks across Georgia who believe in freedom? Let’s leave no vote behind. Let’s leave no community untouched.”

Georgia state Rep. Park Cannon also addressed the crowd before Harris spoke, telling attendees: “Those of us who are historically marginalized, we’re the most impacted, as seen here in Georgia, with the two heartbreaking losses that were entirely preventable, we have to send more than thoughts and prayers. We have to send action. We must send that action to the White House.”

Twenty-year-old Zada Luby was in attendance for Harris’s Atlanta speech. Harris “advocates for people, and women especially, to be able to have dominion over their own bodies and not allow the government to make decisions for them, not putting restrictions on what they can and can’t do,” she said. “I feel like she’s someone who is advocating for what we need and not just what the economy needs or the government needs.

Abortion access is a major concern for Luby, she said, because the six-week ban in Georgia “is literally taking away our rights as women,” she said. 

Fourteen-year-old Ella Murphy is a high school freshman who attended the speech with her mother. “I’m here because I want to learn more and support my future president who is going to make my future and my own future daughter’s future possible,” said Murphy, who  wore an “Abortion is Healthcare” T-shirt and a “Regulate Guns Not Women’s Bodies” button. 

“As a woman growing up in the world, I feel like my rights are getting taken away and I need someone to fight for them. Kamala will fight for them,” Murphy said. “Why is abortion a political issue? I don’t think it should be a political issue and it wasn’t one until certain people tried to make it a political issue and not what it is, which is health care.”

The coalition of people motivated in the election by abortion is broad, Butler said, pointing to the diversity in the room. 

Namiah Howard, 16, and her mother, Dana Lloyd, were also there to see Harris. Howard said she thinks that Harris is a “complicated” candidate, but that she is “praying to whoever anybody believes in that Harris will be president, because I’m not going back to the 1950s.”

Abortion is “central” to the conversation about Black women’s maternal health care, Lloyd said. So often Black women aren’t believed by those in the medical establishment. “If people aren’t taken at their word about what happens in their body, of course they’re not going to have good access to health care,” she said.

Howard said she sees Harris’ candidacy as critical to her own future for this reason. 

“All these cisgender, Caucasian males in the government keep saying, ‘Nope — you don’t get to have dreams.’ They have the audacity to say, ‘You brought this upon yourself, now go deal with it.’ But they don’t want to provide us with the support and tools that you need to deal with it,” she said, adding: “That’s neglect. This is just stupid.”

Eighty-two counties in Georgia do not have an OB-GYN, with rural parts of the state disproportionately impacted. The health care access crisis in the state is likely being worsened by the six-week abortion ban, enacted in 2022. 

The rural health care crisis is taking a significant toll on low-income families in the state. Nearly 20 percent of Black Georgians live in poverty, compared with 8 percent of White Georgians. With many of these low-income families left uninsured by the state’s continued refusal to expand Medicaid access, rural health care centers are now shouldering a higher percentage of uninsured patients, who often present sicker as a result of not being able to afford care at earlier and more treatable stages of intervention. 

In her remarks, Cannon spoke of being proud of her work not only as a state representative, but as a doula. Through her work, she’s seen the challenges pregnant people in the state — especially Black women — often face in accessing prenatal care and during labor and delivery.  “Someone else has to provide coverage in this gap. Somebody has to advocate for people, specifically people of color, as we go throughout these pregnancies, because my experience shows me that navigating our health care system in the wake of Donald Trump’s abortion bans, has shown me the horrors that people are facing in Georgia every day. I am angry. Are y’all?”

As a result, more rural health care centers are closing across the state, making care even less accessible — and heightening the Black women’s maternal mortality crisis in the state. 

“The road to the White House run through Georgia,” Michelle Nelson, a nurse practitioner and member of the Georgia Commission on Women, told the crowd on Friday ahead of Harris’ remarks. “Vice President Harris is fighting to restore our basic rights and expand health care access. Here is your call to action. You ready? Vote.”

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