Last month, ProPublica published two stories of women who died from abortion bans after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022 via the Dobbs decision. While it wasn’t the first story to surface in the media about such a tragedy — the New Yorker published a similar account in January this year — it was the first time these deaths were deemed “preventable” by a state committee of experts in maternal health.

In the first story, a woman named Amber Nicole Thurman, a 28-year-old mother, died less than a month after Georgia passed its abortion law after waiting 20 hours to get treatment for a rare complication from taking an abortion pill. A 10-member committee set up to examine maternal mortality cases deemed she would have likely lived if doctors had used the protocols that had been in place before the Georgia law made them a felony.

A second story involved a woman named Candi Miller, a 41-year-old mother of three, who had been told by doctors that "having another baby could kill her." Miller had lupus, diabetes and hypertension. She took abortion pills ordered online, and, like Thurman, had an incomplete abortion. In pre-Dobbs Georgia, this would not be a problem, because she could go to the emergency room and walk out a few hours, safe and pregnancy-free. Instead, she died in bed, afraid and in pain. The state committee that........

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