Katie Glenn Daniel, director of legal affairs for Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, says ProPublica's investigative journalists got Amber Thurman and Candi Miller's stories totally wrong.
They claim the state's six-week abortion ban, prohibiting most abortions after fetal cardiac activity is detected, have delayed emergency medical care and caused preventable deaths.
"They blamed Georgia's laws for the deaths of two women who took abortion drugs," Daniel summarizes. "Both of them died from known complications associated with these dangerous drugs, and Georgia's law never prevented them from getting care in the emergency room to treat those deadly complications."
The stories were big topics on the 2024 presidential campaign trail. Vice President Kamala Harris mentioned them while running for president of the United States, but SBA Pro-Life America was just as critical of them at that time.
ProPublica has stood by its reporting. This is the statement ProPublica sent AFN in 2024:
The state's committee of more than 30 experts concluded that the deaths of Amber Thurman and Candi Miller were preventable, a newsworthy finding. Our ongoing reporting is illuminating the challenges doctors face in caring for patients with pregnancy complications in states with restricted access to abortion.
Daniel's pro-life organization, however, maintains the coverage was totally misleading.
"It blames Georgia's pro-life laws for being the reason that these two women died from abortion drugs, when, in fact, the reason that they both tragically died is because of the drugs themselves," Daniel clarifies. "These are drugs with serious known consequences. A new study came out finding that as often as one in 10 women ends up in the emergency room after taking these dangerous drugs."
That study is from the Ethics & Public Policy Center (EPPC), which looked at years of insurance data.
"The problem is abortion," says Daniel. "The problem is not Georgia's pro-life laws, but that doesn't fit ProPublica's pro-abortion agenda."
She says ProPublica assigned blame to the pro-life state of Georgia for the deaths of these women and totally ignored a story out of Nevada where at the same exact time, in September of 2022, another woman died from the same abortion drugs.
"She ended up having a septic abortion and passing away after getting these drugs at Planned Parenthood," the pro-lifer notes. "Her story didn't get coverage from ProPublica because she lived in a very permissive, pro-abortion state."
Daniel asserts that "women cannot trust what the mainstream media says about abortion laws." As she sees it, the mainstream media reports for its friends and ignores other issues.
ProPublica considers itself a "non-ideological" news source, but conservatives have long accused it of harboring a liberal bias based on its acceptance of donations from progressives like George Soros. According to AllSides Media Bias Rating, ProPublica has a "Lean Left" bias.
