Abortion bans are reshaping medicine, with fatal consequences for women
Amber Nicole Thurman should not have died in a hospital bed. She was 28, living in Georgia, and had taken medication for an abortion—a safe, routine procedure. When she developed rare complications, she did what anyone would do: she went to the hospital.
What followed was not a medical failure in the ordinary sense. It was hesitation—produced by law.
Georgia’s abortion laws had changed. Abortion was now illegal after six weeks, with limited exceptions. But those exceptions remained unclear. Doctors feared that treating Amber might be interpreted as performing an illegal abortion. The risk of prosecution, loss of licence and even prison was real. So, they hesitated.
Amber lay in a hospital bed for twenty hours while her condition worsened. She developed sepsis. Her organs began to fail. Nurses monitored her decline while doctors debated their legal liability. Amber was dying in front of them, and they could not decide whether saving her life was legally safe for them. By the time they intervened, it was too late.
In Texas, Tierra Walker’s story unfolded more slowly, but ended the same way.
Tierra was a 37-year-old mother with a complex medical history, including hypertension, diabetes and prior pregnancy complications. She did everything right: she sought care early, attended every appointment and reported every symptom. Over the course of her pregnancy, she saw more than ninety different doctors. Doctors knew her pregnancy was dangerous. She did too. She asked for an abortion because she feared she might die and leave her teenage son without a mother.
Under normal medical standards, that request would have been taken seriously. Under Texas law, it was not enough.
Doctors told her that they could not act until her condition met a legally defensible threshold of imminent death. Her health deteriorated in increments—seizures, rising blood pressure and increasing risk of preeclampsia. Still, her pregnancy was deemed ‘medically stable’, even though she was not. So, Tierra was sent home.
Her son spoon-fed her while she lay in bed, too weak to move. She returned to the hospital repeatedly, each time worse than before. And each time the answer was the same: ‘we cannot act’.
At twenty weeks pregnant, Tierra Walker died. Her cause of death was pre-eclampsia.
The cases of Amber and Tierra, among others, are documented by Kavitha Surana, Lizzie Presser and Roxanne Szal in such online publications as Ms Magazine and ProPublica.
These are extreme cases: most people denied abortion care will not die. But they are not random, and they are not inexplicable. They are the foreseeable outcomes of a system in which care can be delayed, deferred or rendered impossible—not through overt prohibition, but through uncertainty and neglect.
In both cases, doctors knew what needed to be done. What they did not know—what they could not risk—was whether they were allowed to do it. Care was not always refused. It was delayed. Made conditional. And in those delays, the outcomes changed.
Since the fall of Roe v. Wade, abortion bans in the United States have been widely understood as restrictions on access. But they do something more profound than that: they change how medicine is practised. Doctors know what treatment is required. What they do not know is whether the law will punish them for providing it. Intervention must now be justified not only medically, but also legally. The result is hesitation—sometimes measured in hours, sometimes in weeks. In some cases, that hesitation is fatal.
That is not a failure of individual judgement. It is a condition produced by the system itself.
When viewed this way, the problem is not simply that abortion is restricted but that reproductive healthcare has been reorganised around legal ambiguity. The question shifts from what a patient needs to what can be done without legal risk. Intervention is delayed until a condition deteriorates to a point that justifies action. Hence, harm does not always appear as a refusal. It appears to be waiting.
This begins to resemble what Giorgio Agamben calls the state of exception, where law is not fully removed but does not function reliably in practice. Protection exists but is not consistently activated. In this sense, the law operates through delay and withdrawal rather than direct denial. Amber and Tierra were not turned away from care outright. They were admitted, monitored and assessed. But the care they needed was delayed until it was no longer effective. They remained within the legal system, but without certainty that its protections would be allowed in time.
Within this structure, access to reproductive healthcare becomes dependent on discretionary medical and legal judgement. As Penelope Deutscher observes, rights structured through exceptions are not stable rights at all. They are conditional, contingent and easily withdrawn.
Abortion has long existed not as a guaranteed entitlement, but rather as something permitted under specific circumstances. The case history of abortion in the United States makes this structure visible.
As Deutscher notes, ‘states found ways to obstruct Roe v. Wade when it was still intact, through legislative means to obstruct abortion’s access’. For example, in Texas, laws passed in 2003 required doctors to give misleading information and impose a twenty-four-hour waiting period for abortions. In 2011, women were forced to view sonograms and listen to fetal heartbeats prior to an abortion, while in 2017, insurance companies were banned from covering abortions. Florida followed a similar path, introducing a fifteen-week ban and mandatory waiting periods before Roe was overturned. Georgia’s 2012 twenty-week ban relied on the disputed claim that fetuses feel pain at twenty weeks, despite Roe recognising fetal viability at twenty-two to twenty-four weeks. During the COVID-19 pandemic, several US states declared abortion ‘non-essential healthcare’, suspending access, despite contradicting worldwide medical advice.
At a federal level, the Hyde Amendment, introduced in 1976, prohibited the use of federal Medicaid funds for abortion except in very limited circumstances, disproportionately harming low-income women.
These various obstructions to access to abortions function as instances of reproductive and structural violence: barriers enacted not by direct prohibition alone but by systemic and legal constraints. These measures of control reveal how abortion was never secure, even under Roe. For Deutscher, Roe v. Wade never ‘guaranteed practical access to abortion nor redressed economic inequality in the ability to access abortion’. This meant abortion rights were subject to erosion through exceptions and exclusions, which allowed for the ease with which Roe was overturned.
Taken together, these measures show not a single legal shift but a pattern: abortion has been managed through restriction, exception and administrative burden. The fall of Roe did not singlehandedly create this instability—it stripped away the illusion that it was ever stable.
This pattern is not confined to the United States. In Australia, access to reproductive healthcare is widely seen as a basic right for women, yet abortion was not fully decriminalised nationwide until 2023. Even with legal recognition, abortion access remains uneven. As Lucy Barbour reported on the ABC, rural and regional doctors say there is an ‘unspoken ban’ whereby stigma and lack of services leave women unable to access the rights that the law claims to guarantee. In some rural areas in NSW, women must travel over 160 km for abortion access. In South Australia, a proposed bill to limit abortion after twenty-three weeks, with only narrow exceptions, was recently debated. Legal status, in other words, does not guarantee access.
Across these contexts, a consistent pattern emerges. Abortion is not simply permitted or prohibited; it is managed through conditions, thresholds and administrative barriers. Access shifts depending on location, resources and institutional willingness. What appears as a right is therefore always partially unstable.
This produces a particular kind of violence. This violence is not immediate or spectacular. It is slow, administrative and, at times, difficult to see. It operates through delay, non-intervention and legal uncertainty. No single decision appears responsible, yet the outcome is predictable. When reproductive healthcare is made legally risky, inaction becomes the safest option.
If we follow Giorgio Agamben further, this begins to resemble what he calls bare life: a condition in which individuals remain biologically alive but are stripped of meaningful political protection. He refers to this as homo sacer, which names a life that can be left to die but not be legitimately killed. His work has been used extensively in relation to the status of refugees. Bare life is produced through the logic of the state of exception, in which protection is suspended, even while the person remains within the legal order.
Again, this is not exclusion from the system, but rather abandonment within it. Amber and Tierra were left waiting in a system that could not—or would not—act in time. In Amber’s case, doctors quite literally left her to die. More unsettling still, they watched as her condition deteriorated.
It would be easy to describe this purely as a question of rights, whether abortion is legal or not. But that misses something fundamental. Even at its strongest, abortion access was uneven, conditional and vulnerable to erosion. As Deutscher puts it, abortion has always existed as ‘an exception to its own illegality’. The issue is not only that rights have been removed, but that they were never secure to begin with. What these cases expose is not simply the absence of protection but the fragility of protection itself. Hence, the use of Agamben’s work to grasp what is happening here.
Women are left to fight for their own lives within a system that cannot guarantee their care. They must negotiate with authorities to receive healthcare, risking denial, while those who may never bear the burden of pregnancy impose moral and legal restrictions from positions of power. The stakes are clear. Amber died while doctors debated whether she was ‘close enough’ to death to intervene. Tierra died because the law turned her survival into a question rather than a priority. In this way, legal ambiguity does not simply restrict care—it reshapes the conditions under which life-saving treatment becomes possible.
The deaths of Amber Thurman and Tierra Walker are not aberrations. They are the outcome of a system in which care is made conditional and protection uncertain. The law does not need to mandate harm for harm to occur. It only needs to create conditions in which intervention becomes too risky, too unclear or too late. In that space, patients are not refused care outright. They are left waiting for permission that may never come.
The law does not kill. It makes death possible.
Author note: This article uses the term ‘women’ to reflect the language used in the cited cases and sources, which specifically refer to cisgender women. This choice is not intended to exclude trans, non-binary or gender-diverse people who may also experience pregnancy and reproductive healthcare within these legal regimes.
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A fully referenced version of this article will appear on Arena Online.