ProPublica Wins Pulitzer for Politicized Deception

Yesterday, the Pulitzer Prize board announced its 2025 winners.

In the category of “Public Service,” ProPublica won the coveted prize for its series titled “Life of the Mother: How Abortion Bans Lead to Preventable Deaths.”

National Review has doggedly pointed out the misrepresentations platformed in this series — misrepresentations stemming from the authors’ evident bias for “abortion rights.”

The Pulitzer Prize Board — which determines the winners of journalism’s most prestigious award — includes members such as Claire Shipman, the acting president of Columbia University (who replaced Katrina Armstrong, who replaced Minouche Shafik); Viet Thanh Nguyen, professor of American studies and ethnicity at USC and author of Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America; and Ginger Thompson, the managing editor of ProPublica.

To be clear, the stories covered in ProPublica’s “Life of the Mother” series are utterly tragic — and we should be furious that these mothers died preventable deaths.

However, ProPublica — along with virtually every other mainstream media outlet — contributed to the smoke screen that has clouded the actual cause of death in ProPublica’s biggest stories: the cases of Amber Thurman and Candi Miller.

These women did not die because of pro-life legislation. These women did not die because doctors risked legal persecution if they intervened. These women died because abortion pills — especially when taken after the first seven weeks of pregnancy — are incredibly dangerous. One out of ten women experience a serious adverse event, such as sepsis or hemorrhage, within 45 days of taking mifepristone. While no investigation has been completed, it also appears that the negligence of their medical providers played a role.

The real story here, which has received little to no attention in the mainstream media, is how the FDA has slowly but surely removed most of the original guardrails concerning the administration of the abortion pill. Now, young mothers are taking the chemical abortifacient regimen of mifepristone and misoprostol, unaware of its potentially fatal consequences.

As I wrote in the aftermath of Amber Thurman’s tragic death last year:

The primary cause of her death was sepsis, a potential side effect of the most common chemical abortifacient — a regimen of mifepristone and misoprostol. Crucially, the FDA has dramatically loosened regulations on the drugs in recent years — regulations that would help keep women safe.

As National Review highlighted last year, the mifepristone-based chemical-abortion pill RU-486 has become the go-to method of abortion across the U.S.:

According to the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute, medication abortions have increased steadily with each regulatory shift: The pill was used in 17 percent of all U.S. abortions at the end of the Bush administration, but that increased to under a third a decade ago, to a little over half on the eve of the Dobbs decision, and to nearly two-thirds in 2023.

This growth is connected to these pills’ ease of access and the litany of progressive NGOs that seek to distribute them to women across the country, no questions asked.

However, these drugs are known to send women to the emergency room.

A woman who takes abortion pills late in her pregnancy — anytime after two months — could land in the emergency room for extensive bleeding, sepsis, or worse. The FDA’s own label for abortion pills says that approximately one in 25 women who take the drugs will end up in the emergency room. That likelihood increases with gestational age. Among women who take abortion pills after 84 days of gestation, nearly 40 percent will require follow-up surgery, and 4 percent will sustain significant infection.

In its “Life of the Mother” series, ProPublica has also published several stories attacking failed data-gathering, such as “The CDC Hasn’t Asked States to Track Deaths Linked to Abortion Bans.” Ironically, pro-lifers have been asking for record-keeping requirements so that data-gathering bodies can track all the ER visits connected to side effects of chemical abortifacients. Without these records, research institutes have had to use other methods to determine the real dangers of mifepristone. According to a massive study of nearly 900,000 insurance claims, conducted by the Ethics and Public Policy Center, “10.93 percent of women experience sepsis, infection, hemorrhaging, or another serious adverse event within 45 days following a mifepristone abortion.”

Pro-abortion advocates have religiously held that (1) chemical abortion is safe and (2) it’s the fault of pro-life legislation when mothers die from taking it.

In total, ProPublica’s “Life of the Mother” series contains ten articles that all blame pro-life legislation for preventable deaths. Two heart-wrenching articles from the series share the stories of Amber Thurman and Candi Miller, mothers who died preventable deaths after succumbing to fatal side effects of the abortion pill. Two other articles share the tragic stories of Josseli Barnica and Nevaeh Crain — young women who died from miscarriage-related sepsis. (Abortifacients did not play a role in their deaths.)

Regardless of the cause of a miscarriage, all OB-GYN medical providers are trained on the proper response to ensure that the mother does not suffer from infection. Every piece of pro-life legislation distinguishes between a remedial dilation and curettage (D&C) procedure and an elective surgical abortion. As I have written before, in the case of Amber Thurman:

A D&C is a standard medical practice, most often used in the first trimester if a woman suffers an incomplete miscarriage, to ensure that all fetal remains have been cleared from the womb. …And even if, somehow, the fetus in Thurman’s infected womb had still had a heartbeat, the doctors and nurses attending to her would have been clearly free to perform a D&C on her under Georgia law.

House Bill 481, known as the “Living Infants Fairness and Equality (LIFE) Act,” states:

(b) No abortion is authorized or shall be performed if the probable gestational age of the unborn child has been determined…to have a detectable human heartbeat except when:

1. A physician determines, in reasonable medical judgment, that a medical emergency exists.
2. The probable gestational age of the unborn child is 20 weeks or less and the pregnancy is the result of rape or incest in which an official police report has been filed alleging the offense of rape or incest.
3. A physician determines, in reasonable medical judgment, that the pregnancy is medically futile.

While pro-life legislation varies state by state, all share similar clarifications and exemptions to those outlined in Georgia’s LIFE Act.

Any medical professional who refuses to treat a woman undergoing a miscarriage, for fear of “breaking” a pro-life law, is detrimentally misinformed. No doctors or nurses are at risk of being sued by the state if they care for women. (Rather, they risk a malpractice suit for negligence.)

If medical professionals are truly refusing to treat mothers because of misinformation about the content of pro-life legislation, this is a damning evaluation of the media outlets that misinformed them.

Amber Thurman, Candi Miller, Josseli Barnica, and Nevaeh Crain should all have received prompt and lifesaving care from their medical providers. They didn’t get it.

ProPublica has argued in its series that pro-life legislation places undue burdens on medical providers, making it hard to determine when they are allowed to act. This is both false and patronizing. As Dan McLaughlin has clearly argued, all medical providers operate within a web of rules and regulations.

Georgia hospitals, like hospitals all across the country, operate in an Amazonian jungle of laws and regulations, federal and state, and comply with extensive standards of judge-made tort law. . . . Hospitals and doctors practice medicine every day knowing that they can be sued for medical malpractice, sanctioned by the state medical board, or denied payment by Medicare or Medicaid or private insurance if they fail to adhere to prevailing medical standards, fail to provide medically necessary care, provide medically unnecessary care, or provide substandard care. More than 10,000 medical-malpractice claims are filed in the United States every year, many of them asserting that doctors failed to do something necessary to save a life.

Certainly, doctors from organizations such as ACOG, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, are champing at the bit to claim that pro-life legislation leads to the death of women. However, for an organization that is dedicated to abortion advocacy, ACOG has many motivating factors to blame pro-life legislation for the harms done by dangerous abortifacients or hospital failures.

While ProPublica enjoys its prize, I hope more medical providers will not be cowed into fear or negligence by pro-choice disinformation campaigns.

Kayla Bartsch is a William F. Buckley, Jr. Fellow in Political Journalism. She is a recent graduate of Yale College and a former teaching assistant for Hudson Institute Political Studies.

Reprinted with Permission from The National Review – By Kayla Bartsch

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of AMAC or AMAC Action.