This week, ProPublica released two studies tracing the deaths of two women to Georgia’s six-week abortion ban—the first to be reported since the reversal of Roe v. Wade. Twenty-eight-year-old Amber Thurman took abortion pills but did not completely expel the fetal tissue from her body. She developed a serious infection and went to the hospital, where physicians would ordinarily have performed a dilation and curettage to remove the remaining tissue. In Thurman’s case, however, physicians failed to act for roughly 20 hours. They waited to operate until the situation was dire, and Thurman died.

Candi Miller, a mother of three, suffered from lupus, diabetes, and hypertension, and she was warned that her health was so fragile that she might not survive another pregnancy. When she accidentally became pregnant again, she ordered abortion pills online. Like Thurman, Miller didn’t entirely expel the fetal tissue and developed a serious infection. But Miller did not seek out care. Her family reported that she was aware of Georgia’s criminal abortion law and afraid of what would happen if she sought emergency care. Her husband found her unresponsive in bed, her 3-year-old daughter at her side.

A state medical committee subsequently concluded that Miller’s and Thurman’s deaths had been preventable. And at least in Miller’s case, the committee drew a causal connection between Miller’s death and the state’s abortion ban.

Stories about physicians’ reluctance to provide emergency care to pregnant patients have become common since the Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade, both in the media and in court. Perhaps more wrenching still, we have expected to see deaths like Thurman’s and Miller’s, based on what we know about the long history of abortion’s criminalization.

Abortion opponents have already argued that physicians could have legally intervened to save both Miller and Thurman. They might be right. But history makes clear that criminal laws create harm not only because they are too narrow or confusing or contradictory. Criminalization also causes harm because it generates fear, for physicians........

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