“Promise me you’ll take care of my son.”

Those were Amber Nicole Thurman’s last words to her mother in 2022.

Thurman needed a routine procedure after encountering a rare complication from abortion pills. The fetal tissue in her body had not been entirely expelled, so she went to a Stockbridge hospital for a dilation and curettage, or D&C, to have it cleared from her uterus.

Georgia’s strict anti-abortion laws caused a 20-hour delay in the life-saving treatment.

Thurman, 28, died at Piedmont Henry Hospital on Aug. 19, 2022. Her only son was 6 at the time.

ProPublica reported that the state’s investigation of this case marked Thurman’s death the first preventable abortion death since Georgia in July 2022 banned most abortions after six weeks of pregnancy. There will be details of a second case made public soon.

Thurman suffered from an infection that Piedmont Henry was well-equipped to treat. According to the ProPublica account, an official state committee reported doctors waited 20 hours to start the D&C. Just weeks before she died, Georgia followed in line with the 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade and made performing this procedure a felony; any doctor who violated the new law could face up to 10 years in prison.

D&Cs, a procedure to remove tissue from the uterus following a miscarriage or abortion, has been helping save lives since the 1973 ruling in Roe v. Wade. It reduced the rate of maternal deaths for women of color by up to 40% the first year after abortion became legal.

As doctors monitored Thurman’s infection before the procedure, her blood pressure dropped and her organs began to fail. When it came time to operate, it was too late.

Thurman’s heart stopped during surgery.

The official state committee concluded that an otherwise healthy 28-year-old medical assistant should be alive. She would have turned 31 this week.

Thurman, who shared on social media how much she loved having talks with her son, had to drive to North Carolina in 2022 to access abortion care. The single mother found herself pregnant with twins, but her hands were full after recently moving out of her family’s home to live on her own, ProPublica reported after interviews with Thurman’s friends and family. Thurman, who planned to pursue nursing school, enjoyed the stability that allowed her to take her son on new adventures, such as petting zoo, museums and other trips.

Georgia’s six-week abortion ban went into effect on July 20, and Thurman’s pregnancy was beyond that. She tried to hold out and get an abortion close to home, hoping the ban wouldn’t pass. Into her ninth week, she could no longer wait and drove with a friend to North Carolina where abortions were still legal.

She woke up at 4 a.m. to make the drive. She had planned on getting a D&C, but standstill traffic held her up from the appointment time, which the clinic could only hold for 15 minutes since many other people from surrounding states needed care, too.

The clinic administered Thurman mifepristone and misoprostol, a two-pill abortion regimen that nearly 6 million U.S. women have taken since 2000.

Thurman took one pill at the clinic and the next at home the following day as instructed. In the days to come, her cramping pain increased and she exeprienced heavy bleeding. She was too far from North Carolina to return to the clinic, which would have performed a D&C at no additional charge. She was transported to Piedmont Henry in an ambulance on Aug. 18 after vomiting blood and passing out at home.

Piedmont policy was not able to guide doctors on how to navigate the state abortion ban when Thurman arrived at the hospital.

“We actually have the substantiated proof of something we already knew—that abortion bans kill people,” Mini Timmaraju, president of the abortion-rights group Reproductive Freedom for All said in Mother Jones.  

“It cannot go on.”