What The Hell America!

Shanette Williams has become one of the most vocal advocates for restoring federal protections for abortions.

When Shanette Williams speaks publicly, she holds the obituary of her 28-year-old daughter, Amber Nicole Thurman, in her hands. She says it gives her comfort and the strength to continue to tell the story of how a Georgia hospital allowed her daughter to die unnecessarily. 

Williams is a woman who rarely bows her head, unless in prayer. She is striking with the face of a model, high cheekbones, dark chocolate almond-shaped eyes, and a warm smile. 

But for the first two years after her daughter’s death in 2022, Williams was broken. She was unable to leave her Covington town house, suffering from deep depression. Even now, when she comes to United in Faith Christian Ministries church on Sundays, where her brother Anthony Williams is the pastor, she can only sit in the exact seat where her daughter once sat; otherwise, she said, she’ll spend the entire service searching for her. 

Williams, 52, is better these days, thanks to the help of her bereavement counselor and psychiatrist, her church, and her fierce and unyielding activism to uplift her daughter’s name. In the wake of the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade, she has become one of the most vocal advocates for restoring federal protections for abortions. Those voices — which are mostly female and often recount horrific stories of the sometimes deadly consequences of treatment denied — are driven by the hope that their uncomfortable and even grim narratives will change laws in the 19 states with total bans or severe restrictions on abortion care. 

“I can’t just lay in my bedroom and shut myself away from it. I have to fight. I have to. This is my charge,” Williams said. “Just knowing that I can’t pick up a phone and call her. Just knowing I’m not going to hear her say, ‘Mom, let’s go to Bath & Body Works and get candles.’ That was our thing.” 

The report of Thurman’s death was originally published by ProPublica on Sept. 16, 2024, which was also Amber Thurman’s birthday. That is when Williams and her family first learned the truth about how doctors at Piedmont Henry Hospital in Stockbridge, Georgia, could have saved her daughter had they not delayed the care she needed. 

“My daughter CJ called me in the wee hours of the morning on August 19th, and she said, ‘Mom, you didn’t know, but Amber’s in the hospital,’” Williams said. According to medical records obtained by ProPublica, Thurman’s white cell count was extremely high, and her blood pressure was dangerously low. 

A few hours later, Williams got another call from CJ telling her that she needed to come to the hospital immediately: Thurman was being transferred to the intensive care unit. When she arrived, her daughter was covered in tubes and being treated with intravenous antibiotics for a massive infection. It was then that Thurman told her mother she’d had a medication abortion.  

A month or so after the June 2022 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that reversed Roe v. Wade and a constitutional right to abortion, Thurman learned she was pregnant with twins. In July of that year, Georgia’s six-week abortion ban went into effect. 

According to ProPublica, Thurman traveled with a friend to North Carolina to obtain an abortion, but due to traffic, she missed her appointment for a surgical abortion and was instead given pills for a medication abortion. She took mifepristone, the first of two medicines, at the clinic, and the second set of pills, misoprostol, 24 to 48 hours later. A week or so after, Thurman became extremely ill. 

According to the Cleveland Clinic, medication abortions are considered safe, and complications are extremely rare. A 2015 study found that only 35 patients out of over 11,000 experienced significant complications from the pills.

Williams sat with her daughter at the hospital and watched as doctors came in and out of the room, for hour after hour, while Thurman cried out in pain. Williams tried to comfort her, telling her the doctors would help her.  

“‘I’m in pain. It’s too much. It’s overbearing. You’re going to have to take care of Messiah,’” Williams recalled Thurman saying of her then 6-year-old son. Williams told her she’d be better in no time.  

Thurman was a cheerleader and majorette who loved to sing and dance. She worked as a medical assistant and dreamed of going to nursing school one day. Her son was her world. He was her reason for existing, Williams said. 

“I do remember her saying, ‘God, please just let me make it back to my son.’ And I’m saying, ‘Amber, don’t say that. You’re going to be fine,’” said Williams.

Twenty hours after she’d arrived at the hospital, Thurman went into surgery at 1:59 p.m. on Aug. 19. Her family was told that her infection was so severe she’d need a total hysterectomy. 

“I said, ‘I’ll be waiting on you.’ It was almost like, did she know? Because of her mannerisms, everything just changed,” Williams said. 

During the surgery, Thurman’s heart stopped, and doctors were unable to revive her. 

“They brought me back to the room, and there I see my baby dressed with tubes. I never saw this coming,” Williams said.

“I’m looking at her, and I’m saying, ‘Is this really my baby?’ This can’t be. When I left her, she was wide awake,” she said. 

Williams refused to leave her deceased daughter’s side. When the coroner came, she walked with Thurman’s body to the car. 

“I just walked around and touched all four of the glass [windows], and still in this numb state. This can’t be happening. It just can’t be. It was not happening. At that moment, there was no more life in me,” she said. 

“I never knew depression. I never knew grief. I never knew emotions. This new normal that I was faced with literally almost just took me out. I was in a state where nobody could reach me. Nobody could talk to me. Nobody could say anything because whether you know it or not, people say there was nothing you could do, but this whole time, I’m saying, ‘But I was there with her, and I knew nothing’.” 

What Williams did not know was that, according to medical officials in Georgia, her daughter should never have died. The ProPublica reporter, Kavitha Surana, learned from Georgia’s maternal mortality review committee that Thurman’s death was preventable. 

The committee concluded that Thurman should have had an emergency dilation and curettage (D&C), a simple 15-minute procedure to remove the tissue from the uterus. The procedure would have stopped the infection from spreading if she had gotten it as soon as she came to the hospital. 

Kwajelyn Jackson is the executive director of the Feminist Women’s Health Center in Atlanta. The center has been providing reproductive health care, including abortions, since 1976. 

Jackson said when she read about Thurman’s death, she was “perplexed by the actions of the hospital.” 

“She [Thurman] should have been seen immediately if there was no cardiac activity; there should have been nothing stopping them from removing remaining tissue,” Jackson said. “There’s no reason that they should have been quibbling about language when this was a clear and open-and-shut case in my estimation from what I read.”

Jackson added: “And so the only explanation, unfortunately to me, is that in addition to perhaps the overly conservative posture of the hospital legal team, is that as a Black woman, they were not willing to take any additional risk to save her life.” Shanette Williams discusses the moments leading up to her daughter’s death.

According to a 2023 report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the maternal mortality rate for Black women is 50.3 deaths per 100,000 live births, compared to 14.5 deaths per 100,000 for white American birthing people. 

The Center for Reproductive Rights found that Black women in Georgia are 3.3 times more likely to die from pregnancy-related complications than white women, and health experts in the state say over half of those deaths are preventable. 

In September 2024, after Thurman’s death was widely reported, the Georgia Department of Community Health issued a memo to the state’s health care providers “regarding misinformation about abortions in Georgia.” It clarified that “abortion is permissible at any stage of pregnancy to save the life and health of the mother in the event of a medical emergency.” 

“We’ve been sounding the alarm that this was going to happen. And, even when Dobbs happened, we said, you know, this was already an issue,” Dr. Regina Davis Moss, president and CEO of In Our Own Voice: National Black Women’s Reproductive Justice Agenda and the In Our Own Voice Action Fund, told Capital B. “It was entirely preventable, and that’s what we have to sit with, is that we are letting people die when it’s preventable.” 

Renee Bracey Sherman is the co-author of Liberating Abortion: Claiming Our History, Sharing Our Stories, and Building the Reproductive Future We Deserve, and the founder of We Testify, an organization dedicated to centering the stories of people like Shanette Williams.

“I think for Amber Nicole Thurman, it was a mix of not recognizing that she was as far along in needing care, on death’s door as she was, but also this fear of criminalization rather than taking care,” Sherman said. 

“There’s this idea of the hospital — you’re supposed to go there, they’ll save your life. Well, no, they won’t if they’re afraid, if the lawyers say, ‘Don’t do it,’ or if they’re more afraid of the state. And that’s exactly what the anti-abortion movement has hoped, that people will be so afraid that they will, as we’ve been saying, comply in advance.” 

Thurman’s father, Andre, 52, has rarely spoken publicly about his daughter, who, along with her two sisters, Cjauna “CJ”  and Andrika, lived with him for most of their lives after his divorce from Williams. He told Capital B that Amber was a “daddy’s girl,” and he misses her smile every day. 

“She [Thurman] was just a fun person, and when she got older, we became friends, but I was still a dad,” Thurman said. “The last time we went [out] together, we went to a football game. … She was very smart in school. She loved being around people.”

Andre Thurman said talking about his daughter helps him feel better about the loss. “I miss her, but we’re doing something good for her, so it’s my therapy.”

Williams said she had no idea how historic the news about the death of her daughter would be until she was asked to fly to Detroit to appear on a show with Oprah Winfrey and then-Vice President Kamala Harris. 

“Then, as the puzzle unravels, we’re finding out that this law that was passed, signed by [Georgia] Gov. [Brian] Kemp, caused Amber’s care to be delayed, and the doctors. So it’s both. It’s the state of Georgia, and it’s the hospital. The doctors more so because you took an oath,” Williams said. 

In September 2024, civil rights and personal injury attorney Ben Crump was retained by Thurman’s family. 

“Amber Thurman’s preventable death is a horrifying consequence of draconian abortion laws that put politics ahead of women’s lives,” Crump said in a statement. “These lawmakers bear responsibility for creating hesitation among health care workers, who are fearful of the legal consequences when providing necessary care. Her family deserves accountability for the delays in life-saving care that cost Amber her life.”

State Rep. Robert Flournoy, who is a Democrat, represents the district in Georgia where Thurman died. He also presided over Thurman’s funeral.  

“Some of the things we’ve been talking about in the state legislature is making sure that when it comes down to reproductive rights, some things should just be clear-cut,” Flournoy said. 

“My goal is to make sure that I partner with some of my other legislators, and see what all we can get done,” he said. “Of course, we’re in Georgia, so there are certain things that won’t be able to be changed right now until we get back control. But things like, for example, allowing for hospitals to do D&Cs with no repercussions, that should be something that should be able to be agreed upon on both sides of the aisle.”

Andre Thurman says more has to be done to change the laws that killed his daughter. “They let my baby sit down and pass,” he said. 

Williams often visits her daughter’s gravesite in the middle of the night. She is planning to have a light installed near the 28-year-old’s headstone. 

“If I could really be honest, I feel like a part of me has died with her, and I can’t allow them to think it’s OK,” she said, adding that for her, even money from a lawsuit couldn’t make this right. “It’s about the fact that they need to be responsible. Everything that has been taken away.”

“She was alive when she went to the hospital. It was the fact that they chose to allow her to suffer for 20 hours. How can you make logic of that? Twenty hours, a simple procedure. And this is what I’m left with.”

Williams says she will never stop speaking out about her daughter. 

“It’s about that connection. It’s about the fact that I feel her saying, ‘I’m proud of you,’ and that I’m doing something that nobody else can do.”