Is There a Post-Dobbs Back Alley? The Record on Women’s Abortion-Related Deaths

Posted on April 7, 2026 By Rachel MacNair

by Rachel MacNair

I had just turned 14 when Roe v. Wade came down. I reacted positively – it would get rid of back-alley butchers. Soon I realized it actually put a back-alley butcher back in business. The problem wasn’t the legal nature of abortion, but the nature of abortion, period.

There were arguments before Dobbs that abortion bans wouldn’t have dire back-alley impacts that we didn’t already have before. But now we don’t have to speculate about what would happen. We can observe what did happen.

I commented right after Dobbs that we were about to have a “natural experiment” – unlike a lab experiment, it’s not set up on purpose, but it’s still set up, so we can collect data. My post’s first section made predictions on women’s deaths. I document below that my predictions were just about right.

ProPublica has been chomping at the bit to show abortion bans have deadly consequences for women. It won a 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for its coverage.

If abortion bans are deadly for women, that would be alarming to those of us advocating them. So – is it true?

ProPublica List

(to date, April 2026; in chronological order by death date)

Name Date of Death	Condition	Malpractice?
Joselli Barnica 09.07.21	Wanted pregnancy, miscarriage	Delayed antibiotics for sepsis, etc.
Amber Thurman 08.19.2022	Legal Abortion	Delayed D&C at emergency visit 5 days later
Candi Miller 11.12.2022	Abortion pill from online	From the online source, sloppiness
Porsha Ngumezi 06.11.2023	Natural Miscarriage	Delayed, treated with misoprostol when should have been D&C
Nevaeh Craine 10.29.2023	Wanted pregnancy, infection	Two hospitals and three visits, ignored symptoms
Tierra Walker 12.26.2024	Difficult pregnancy	Several ways of not following protocols

Joselli Barnica

ProPublica: “A Woman Died After Being Told It Would Be a ‘Crime’ to Intervene in Her Miscarriage at a Texas Hospital.”

Secular Pro-Life Video: Does Texas require doctors to wait until there’s no heartbeat to intervene in emergencies? (Josseli Barnica)

Before Dobbs, with a Texas abortion ban, Joselli had a wanted pregnancy but suffered a miscarriage at 17 weeks. They delayed intervention until there was no heartbeat, citing the Texas heartbeat law. Unlike the following cases, ProPublica had the word of the medical team. They misinterpreted the law; the remedy is to educate doctors on this.

After the D&C was finally done, doctors didn’t confirm the fetal parts were all removed and sent her home with them still inside her. She got an infection. It caused her death. The doctors should have taken her concern seriously when she reported symptoms. There’s certainly no abortion ban that keeps doctors from properly monitoring and treating an infection.

Amber Nicole Thurman

ProPublica: Abortion Bans Have Delayed Emergency Medical Care

Secular Pro-Life: Georgia Woman Dies After Delayed Treatment of Abortion Pill Complications (Amber Thurman)

LifeNews.com: Leading OBGYN Believes Woman Died From Abortion Pill, Not Pro-Life Law

Amber was a Georgia resident, past the state’s gestational limit. She went to North Carolina to get the abortion pill regimen. Returning to Georgia, five days later she had complications. The doctors discussed but didn’t do a clearly-indicated D&C to remove fetal remains. Since the twins were already dead, there was no legal issue. ProPublica attributed this delay to doctors’ fears of the Georgia heartbeat law, without asking them what the reason for delay was.

Candi Miller

ProPublica: Candi Miller Died Afraid to Seek Care Amid Georgia’s Abortion Ban

LifeNews.com: Candi Miller Died From the Abortion Pill, Not From an Abortion Ban

This involved an online order of abortion pills. Of course that’s dangerous. No check for ectopic pregnancy, which the pill wouldn’t treat? No check for negative blood type to see if she needs a Rho-gam shot? Those who argue it shouldn’t be banned should at least insist on better regulation and monitoring.

Porsha Ngumezi

ProPublica: A Third Woman Died Under Texas’ Abortion Ban

Secular Pro-Life: ProPublica tries again: responding to claims about Porsha Ngumezi’s death

Porsha Ngumezi bled heavily from a miscarriage and went to the emergency room. She wasn’t seen for seven hours and then was given misoprostol instead of a proper D&C. After she died, the doctor’s notes claim her bleeding was minimal, contradicting nurses’ notes. Delaying the D&C for fear of the abortion ban? Administering misoprostol would also be against that ban.

Nevaeh Craine

ProPublica: A Pregnant Teenager Died After Trying to Get Care in Three Visits to Texas Emergency Rooms

Secular Pro-Life: Nevaeh Crain’s family says her death is being used for politics

and ProPublica can’t see malpractice, only abortion bans (Neveah Crain)

LifeNews.com: Nevaeh Crain Died Because of Poor Medical Care, Not From an Abortion Ban and Neveah Crain’s Family Blame Hospitals for Her Death, Not Texas Abortion Ban

Nevaeh was happily 6 months pregnant. With symptoms of infection, she made three different visits to two different emergency rooms and couldn’t get them to take her reports of symptoms seriously.

Tierra Walker

ProPublica: In Texas, Tierra Walker Wasn’t Offered an Abortion Before a High-risk Pregnancy Killed Her

Secular Pro-Life: Interview with Dr. Christina Francis regarding the case of Tierra Walker

LifeNews.com: Abortion Activists Exploit Pregnant Woman’s Tragic Death to Lie About Abortion Bans

Tierra had a high-risk pregnancy and so should have received better coordinated care than she did. ProPublica claims at 20 weeks she asked about terminating and was turned down. But at 20 weeks, terminating a high-risk pregnancy has its own medical risks. It’s not like getting rid of the pregnancy gets rid of the risk. So doctors’ judgment on the medical issue alone may have been correct. What we do know suggests that the medical risk management could have been better coordinated.

Not on the List Because There Was No Ban to Blame

Alexis Aguellos died February 6, 2025 from an amniotic fluid embolism as a complication of a 22-week abortion at Fort Collins Planned Parenthood. State legislature testimony, heard in the video clip below, shows the ambulance was called much later than it should have been.

This fits the pattern of the Roe era. Abortion-related deaths were only kept track of by pro-life groups (see lists from Feminists for Life, Students for Life, and Operation Rescue). Women’s deaths from abortions when there’s no ban don’t count in “pro-choice” eyes. Literally – they don’t count them.

Baseline

Here are the most recent numbers on abortion-related women’s deaths from the Centers for Disease Control when Roe was reigning:

To reasonably conclude that abortion bans, introduced in 2022 or soon thereafter, caused a spike in abortion-related maternal deaths, there would have to be more such deaths than in preceding years. ProPublica mentions six cases in three years. Only the two from 2022 would count as abortion-related, and no previous year had fewer deaths than that.

The concept of making a before-and-after comparison, basic to science, hasn’t been done. These are journalists, not scientists, and it shows. But even journalists should take into account a comparison to what happened previously before declaring a change, for fear of discovering that they’re only finding the situation is about the same after Dobbs as it was before.

Dobbs didn’t stop malpractice. Separate from abortion, it’s been a longstanding problem in the medical field to dismiss women’s reports of pain or symptoms.

Conclusion

We now have well over three years of experience of a post-Dobbs world in which 13 U.S. states have banned abortion and 28 more have gestational limits. We have a publication that’s pouring resources into trying to find these bans hurting women. They find cases that fit the narrative, find pro-abortion doctors to bolster their case, ignore what the actual doctors involved in the cases have to say, and assert what they know to be true because it’s supposed to be true.

ProPublica and others of similar advocacy claim women wouldn’t get proper treatment for natural miscarriages as doctors delayed needed treatment for fear of abortion bans. There are thousands upon thousands of women suffering natural miscarriages every year. They get the needed treatment. If this were actually a widespread problem, ProPublica reporters should be able to come up with many more cases.

I’m grieved for the loss of the lives of all the women they named and the one they didn’t. I also grieve for the amount of harm that’s been done to women by abortion businesses.

I personally have found a flood of problems just at Planned Parenthood since the year 2000 that dwarfs the evidence they give:

Well over a hundred malpractice lawsuits, an average of over four a year.
Hundreds of ambulance calls.
Some of the health inspection reports detail horrifying clinic conditions.
Many of the patient and employee online reviews indicate medical dangers, including emergency room visits.

Those mainly don’t involve deaths, though there are 11 cases of patient deaths. They include a lot of complaints that don’t have to do with abortion. So these findings aren’t comparable.

But the point is that finding risky practices among abortion providers is easy to do. ProPublica weakens their case by being unaware of how meager their cases are in comparison.

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For posts on similar topics, see:

The Back Alley and the Front Alley

Post-Roe Stats: the Natural Experiment

Abortion Facilitates Sex Abuse: Documentation

Excerpt – Peace Psychology Perspectives on Abortion: Child Abuse

Almost No One? How Survey Polls Work