ATLANTA — When Kaycee Maruscsak’s baby died before birth, she had to carry the infant’s corpse in her womb for more than a week because, she said, doctors refused to remove it for fear of violating Georgia’s abortion restrictions.
“I should not have had to wait eight days to have a dead baby removed out of me,” she said at the state Capitol Tuesday.
The story of the 31-year-old Lilburn woman was part of the bitter testimony during a state Senate Urban Affairs Committee hearing that Democrats hope will galvanize Georgia voters against Republicans, who backed the state’s new limits on abortion. They scheduled the hearing on the third anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision striking down the decades-old legal precedent that had guaranteed women’s right to abortion.
No Republican officials appeared for the hearing, including Attorney General Chris Carr. He had declined the Democrats’ invitation to talk about Georgia’s abortion law, which bans the procedure once a fetal heartbeat is detected, typically around six weeks from conception.
The Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization allowed Georgia’s 2019 abortion restrictions to take full effect last year, after a delay caused by a lawsuit.
Pregnant women have subsequently been denied medical care in Georgia during miscarriages because of uncertainty among doctors about whether they could face prosecution for it.
In one highly publicized case, Amber Nicole Thurman died after doctors delayed removing remnants of her fetus after she self-aborted the baby by taking pills.
Her mother, Shanette Williams, asserted her death was caused by doctors.
“She didn’t just die. She was murdered by the people who took the oath to do no harm,” said Williams, who testified at Tuesday’s hearing via Zoom. She said her daughter died of sepsis, which she said could have been avoided with a 3-minute procedure that she said was withheld for 20 hours.
She described taking her grandson, now 8, to scatter Skittles over his mother’s grave — one of her favorite snacks — on a rainy Mother’s Day.
Democratic senators and others who testified blamed a “vague” Georgia abortion ban that they said creates an “air of criminality” around women who miscarry or need an abortion for a medical reason. They skewered Carr, who is running for governor, saying he could reduce the number of these incidents by issuing an opinion clarifying when abortion is legal under the law.
Senate Minority Leader Harold Jones II, D-Augusta, called Carr’s absence “shameful.”
At a press conference after the hearing, the Democratic senators drove home their point with a poster showing Carr’s smiling portrait on a milk carton, under the word “missing.”
Carr’s office told Capitol Beat that he informed the committee weeks ago that he had longstanding commitments and could not attend the hearing.
“It’s disappointing to see a serious topic overshadowed by partisan theatrics,” Carr’s office said.
Maruscsak, who had to carry her daughter, Sawyer, in her womb for a week after the baby’s heartbeat stopped, described her struggles to find medical care.
She said she visited multiple doctors and abortion clinics and even waited seven hours in an emergency room overflow bed, while bleeding, and couldn’t get the fetus removed despite symptoms of sepsis.
Maruscsak said she had placenta previa, whereby the placenta attaches to the wrong part of the uterus. She said she had to leave the emergency room to find a doctor who was bold enough to remove the fetus despite the abortion ban, eventually trying as many as five doctors.
She predicted that other Georgia women will have the same life-threatening experience.
“This issue will touch every family in some way, someday,” she said.