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CV NEWS FEED // ProPublica has received a 2025 Pulitzer Prize for a report critics say falsely blamed a Georgia woman’s death on pro-life legislation — despite evidence that her fatal complications stemmed from the abortion pill.
The reporting team, which included Kavitha Surana, Lizzie Presser, Cassandra Jaramillo, and Stacy Kranitz, was awarded the prize for coverage the Associated Press described as “reporting on pregnant women who died after doctors delayed urgent care in states with strict abortion laws,” according to Shawn Fleetwood of The Federalist.
Left unmentioned was that the story at the center of the award has been widely challenged for its misleading framing.
ProPublica centered its reporting on the 2022 death of Amber Thurman, a Georgia mother whose passing it attributed to alleged confusion about the state’s abortion laws. The story ran just weeks before the 2024 presidential election.
However, Thurman “died on the table during a surgery only needed because she suffered severe complications from ingesting abortion pills associated with sometimes fatal complications,” according to Federalist’s Jordan Boyd.
Last week, the Ethics and Public Policy Center released the largest known study of the abortion pill, revealing that more than 10% of women who take mifepristone experience sepsis, hemorrhage, or other serious complications — a rate that is 22 times higher than the FDA approved drug label’s claim of “less than 0.5 percent.”
“Thanks to the Biden administration’s radically relaxed abortion pill expansions, Thurman was able to induce abortion hours away at home unsupervised,” Boyd noted.
CatholicVote previously reported that prominent pro-life leaders decried the media’s handling of Thurman’s story, calling it a case of “medical negligence and misinformation.” Analysts pointed out that Thurman’s death was not the result of pro-life policy, but of a dangerous lack of oversight in the administration of chemical abortion drugs.
After former Vice President Kamala Harris falsely claimed during the 2024 campaign that Donald Trump’s abortion policies caused Thurman’s death, The Wall Street Journal ran a fact-check exposing the inaccuracy.
ProPublica’s award follows what Fleetwood described as a growing trend of journalism prizes being awarded to politically driven narratives.
“If Americans needed further proof that the Pulitzer Prize has become nothing more than a glorified gold sticker given to the media’s biggest left-wing propagandists,” Fleetwood wrote, “the award’s 2025 winners are sure to convince them.”
