Mollie Shiflett ’26 is a double major in history and linguistics, not that she knows what to do with that. She plays on Women’s Club Soccer Gold for the College of William and Mary and is an avid fan of most sports — except golf. Email Mollie at mrshiflett@wm.edu.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own.
We’re heading towards another election cycle, which is exciting but also highlights the problems that are facing us as a nation and as voters. September 16, ProPublica came out with an article, which cited a medical review board that called the death of Amber Nicole Thurman “preventable.” Which it was.
Amber Nicole Thurman lived in Georgia, but she was forced to drive to North Carolina to get an abortion. Traffic caused her to miss her appointment, so she was given pills to initiate the abortion and sent home, except they didn’t work completely. Thurman became septic and went to her local hospital to receive a dilation and curettage operation to remove the last of the tissue that was causing the sepsis. However, the state of Georgia now considers that operation to be a felony. Doctors at the hospital withheld care until 20 hours later, at which point nothing could save Thurman. Preventable is an understatement. Shocking and despicable fits the bill, and that is the threat that the Republican Party poses to women in the United States.
We shouldn’t have to live in a world where a woman needs to get closer to dying before a doctor can help her. Since the overturning of Roe v. Wade, there have been plenty of well-documented cases of women who were denied abortions and suffered medical complications, with one notable difference: they’re all still alive. Honestly, this isn’t the part of this that pisses me off the most. It’s the knowledge that her death isn’t gonna make a damn bit of difference to the position of the Republican Party.
One would hope that the death of a 28-year-old woman would cause a change of heart. However, I know for a fact that every single Republican will blame Thurman for her death, because she decided to take mifepristone, and had the unmitigated gall to try to make her own decisions about her own body, because they don’t care if their desire to “protect life” costs other people theirs. Laws like the one in Georgia stop doctors from being doctors, they not only legislate women’s ability to make their own decisions, but they also stop doctors from doing the one thing that doctors should always be able to do: help people.
The Republican Party has done its damage since the Dobbs v. Jackson decision, and we as citizens cannot allow them the power to legislate this issue nationally, because things will only get worse for women in this country. Maybe it won’t for those of us that often rest easy in our implicit privilege, but it will for the minority communities in this country. If this can affect even middle-class women in Texas now, it will touch everyone, in one way or another, eventually.
Donald Trump has called abortion bans “beautiful things.” It tracks that a president so infatuated with authoritarian dictators would admire laws with the ability to kill people. And there’s no reason to believe that he won’t double down on that position if he is elected again.
When we all go to the polls in November, I hope at least some of us will carry this young woman and others like her with us. She’s not here anymore, but we can stand up for her now. We can say that we won’t allow anyone to tell us what we can do with our bodies, and we won’t let anyone else die like this.