Dangerous abortion drugs continue to harm women
The following quote may be attributed to Alliance Defending Freedom Senior Counsel Erin Hawley, vice president of the ADF Center for Life and Regulatory Practice, regarding the tragic death of a 28-year-old Georgia woman after she faced severe complications caused by abortion drugs:
“The horrific loss of Amber Nicole Thurman was a preventable tragedy. The young woman was given the abortion drug mifepristone at a clinic and then instructed to take a second abortion drug at home by herself. After she faced severe complications, including a septic infection, and went to the emergency room, the doctors failed to save her life. Every state with pro-life laws, including Georgia, allows doctors to save the life of a mother by any means necessary. Indeed, numerous exceptions to Georgia’s pro-life law permitted doctors to treat Ms. Thurman immediately. For starters, the law doesn’t apply when a child does not have a detectable heartbeat, and it forbids a D&C procedure only when performed with the specific intent to cause the death of an unborn child. Here, Ms. Thurman’s twins were already deceased. Any argument that doctors were unable to treat Ms. Thurman is a shameless attempt to use tragedy to push a political agenda. Indeed, the doctors involved appear never to have made that argument.
If the previous safeguards required by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration were still in place, Ms. Thurman would have had two follow-up visits with her doctors. But the FDA rolled back these common-sense protections even though its own label on abortion drugs says that roughly one in 25 women will end up in the emergency room. The FDA’s actions recklessly disregard the serious risks that abortion drugs pose to pregnant women.”
Alliance Defending Freedom is an alliance-building, non-profit legal organization committed to protecting religious freedom, free speech, parental rights, and the sanctity of life.
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ABOUT Erin Morrow Hawley
Erin Morrow Hawley serves as senior counsel and vice president of the Center for Life and regulatory practice at Alliance Defending Freedom. Before joining ADF, Hawley practiced appellate law at Kirkland and Ellis LLP, Bancroft LLP, and King & Spalding LLP. Hawley has litigated extensively before the U.S. Supreme Court as well as numerous federal courts of appeals and state courts of last resort. She also worked at the U.S. Department of Justice, serving as counsel to Attorney General Michael Mukasey. As an academic, Hawley served as an associate professor of law at the University of Missouri and she also taught constitutional law as a senior fellow at the Kinder Institute for Constitutional Democracy. Hawley is a former law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John G. Roberts and Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit. Hawley received her bachelor’s degree in Animal Science from Texas A&M University and her law degree from Yale Law School where she served as a Coker Fellow in Constitutional Law and on the Yale Law Journal. She is an active member of the Missouri and District of Columbia bars and is admitted to practice before the U.S. Supreme Court and various federal courts of appeals.