Lawrence O’Donnell fought back tears while slamming Donald Trump and George W. Bush for their involvement in legalizing the criminalization of dilation and curettage (D&C) surgical procedures that saved his own mother’s life when he was a child. In outlining how anti-abortion legislation has led to the injury and deaths of several American women, he spotlighted the recent case of Amber Nicole Thurman.
“When I was six years old, my mother had the same medical procedure that Amber Nicole Thurman desperately needed to live,” O’Donnell said during his MSNBC series “The Last Word With Lawrence O’Donnell.”
“My mother had given birth to five healthy children, but she kept going. She was trying, trying to have a sister for her only daughter, trying for one more. And she suffered a miscarriage and she routinely had a D&C at a local hospital in Boston years before abortion was legal because D&C has absolutely nothing to do with abortion.”
Watch the full segment below:
He went on to say the D&C procedure was widely accepted, even by the Catholic institution he attended as a child.
“Our beloved Monsignor Bradley knew that when mothers in St. Brendan’s Parish had miscarriages, the doctors should give them whatever treatment they needed,” O’Donnell explained. “Anti-abortion Catholic doctors performed that procedure routinely. There wasn’t a single Irish Catholic politician in Boston, including the mayor and the district attorney, who ever tried to interfere with that medical procedure.”
As the host began to reflect on how his mother’s experience could have turned out differently, in the event that D&Cs weren’t available, he became emotional.
“Their sisters were having that procedure. Their daughters were having that procedure routinely in anti-abortion Boston, because it has nothing to do with abortion. Nothing. If a politician interfered with that procedure and killed–” O’Donnell said before breaking.
He then stopped to breathe, holding back tears as he collected himself. “–Killed my mother when I was six years old, who’s going to tell that boy? Who’s going to tell that six-year-old how his mother died and who is really responsible?”
Thurman, who died two years ago at age 28, has been called the country’s first “preventable” abortion-related death since Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022 and abortion restrictions across the country were approved. According to ProPublica, Thurman suffered from an infection after taking abortion pills that did not expel all of the fetal tissue from her body. When she went to Atlanta’s Piedmont Henry Hospital seeking what is referred to as a common D&C (which scrapes the lining of the uterus to remove tissue), she was unable to receive it because the process was banned and made a felony, with minor exceptions, earlier that summer. While doctors monitored her, she stayed in the hospital in pain as her blood pressure began to drop and her organs started to fail. After a 20-hour wait, doctors started the procedure. But by that point, it was too late.
O’Donnell blamed Trump, who has celebrated his involvement in the overturning of Roe v. Wade, and George W. Bush, for their hand in making procedures like D&Cs inaccessible.
“George W. Bush in his silent retirement in Texas made that routine medical procedure a felony,” O’Donnell said. “Donald Trump is proud to noisily take credit for overturning Roe v. Wade and claiming that we all wanted that to happen, and he is pretending that he has no blood on his hands. Donald Trump is pretending that he had nothing to do with making a procedure, a routine medical procedure like a D&C, a felony. Amber Nicole Thurman would be alive tonight if the Supreme Court had not handed the 2000 presidential election to George W. Bush. Without George W. Bush’s appointees to the Supreme Court, Amber Nicole Thurman would be alive tonight.”
He continued: “Donald Trump took away the rights that enabled him to say to his girlfriend, ‘What are we going to do about this?’ when she was pregnant. Donald Trump is telling American men, ‘You don’t get to have the option that I always had whenever anyone told me she was pregnant.’ Donald Trump could say, ‘What are we going to do about this?’ every single time, to a wife or a girlfriend. And now, people are dying. Women are dying. The choices made by George W. Bush and Donald Trump are now killing people.”
Watch the full “Last Word With Lawrence O’Donnell” segment in the video above.
