COBB COUNTY, Ga. — A Georgia lawmaker shared a personal and painful abortion story with a crowd of about 400 people Friday, leading up to a speech by US Vice President and 2024 Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris.
State Rep. Shea Roberts (D-Atlanta) told Harris supporters that she underwent an abortion that’s now illegal in Georgia.
Roberts was 38 at the time and 12 weeks pregnant when a doctor discovered that the fetus had a chromosomal condition called Trisomy 18, which doctors told her was “incompatible with life.” Doctors told her the baby would be stillborn or would die miserably within hours of birth. It was “devastating news,” Roberts told the crowd at the Cobb Energy Center Friday.
Because of her age, which made a pregnancy risky, doctors recommended an abortion.
“I have no doubt in my mind that we made the right decision for my health and our family,” Roberts said. “My own daughters do not have the option to make this health care decision” under the Georgia law, which Roberts opposed. The state House of Representatives approved it with a one vote margin.
Backers of the law say it protects life in the womb, which they described as "the most vulnerable Georgians."
In her speech Friday, Harris described a meeting she had with the family of a Georgia woman, Amber Nicole Thurman, who died shortly after Georgia doctors declined to treat her for complications she’d had after undergoing an abortion procedure in North Carolina. The woman’s family said the doctors were afraid the state’s new “heartbeat” abortion law would criminalize their post-abortion treatment of the woman.
Roberts had written about her abortion on a Fox News site in 2022. Roberts told 11Alive News she did it to reach people opposed to legal abortion. Georgia’s heartbeat bill, which outlaws abortion after six weeks gestation, became law after the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 decision that legalized abortion.