by Kavitha Surana

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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 may 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.

Why should I trust your reporting? I (Kavitha Surana) am a reporter that has been covering reproductive health care access since Roe v. Wade was overturned. I’ve spoken with doctors, community workers and patients across the country about how abortion bans have made pregnancy more dangerous in America, and I’ve written about the Republican lawmakers who refused to listen.

If you want to get in touch and learn more about how I work, email me. I take your privacy very seriously.

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.

Her teenage son watched her suffer for days after she took the pills, bedridden and moaning. In the early hours of Nov. 12, 2022, her husband found her unresponsive in bed, her 3-year-old daughter at her side.

An autopsy found unexpelled fetal tissue, confirming that the abortion had not fully completed. It also found a lethal combination of painkillers, including the dangerous opioid fentanyl. Miller had no history of drug use, the medical records state; her family has no idea how she obtained them or what was going through her mind — whether she was trying to quell the pain, complete the abortion or end her life. A medical examiner was unable to determine the manner of death.

Her family later told a coroner she hadn’t visited a doctor “due to the current legislation on pregnancies and abortions.”

When a state committee of experts in maternal health, including 10 doctors, reviewed her case this year at the end of August, they immediately decided it was “preventable” and blamed the state’s abortion ban, according to members who spoke to ProPublica on the condition of anonymity.

They came to that conclusion after weighing the entire chain of events, from Miller’s underlying health conditions, to her decision to manage her abortion alone, to her reticence to seek medical care. “The fact that she felt that she had to make these decisions, that she didn’t have adequate choices here in Georgia, we felt........

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