The family of Amber Thurman, a Georgia woman who died after allegedly being denied an emergency abortion for 20 hours, joined surrogates for Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign on Tuesday to warn about the stakes for women in November’s election. 

The call, which featured Thurman’s mother and sisters and Georgia Democratic Sens. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, came before former President Donald Trump is set to participate in a town hall event with Fox News in the Peach State focused specifically on issues impacting women – a voting bloc polls show he has struggled to reach.  

“You need to vote like your life depends on it,” Warnock said on Tuesday’s call with reporters. “It does.” 

The mother of 28-year-old Thurman, Shanette Williams, who was visibly emotional throughout the call, recounted the day her daughter died, including telling her at the hospital just before her death that she was in the best care. 

“When I looked at her and reassured her that she was in the best care, I had no clue, I had no clue that this could have been prevented,” Williams said. “And when I found that out, everything changed.”

Thurman, who developed a rare complication from abortion pills, died after doctors at a Georgia hospital waited 20 hours before operating on her due to the state’s near-total abortion ban. Her death, as first reported by ProPublica, was later deemed “preventable" by a state medical review committee. 

“Initially, I wasn’t a political person, I’m independent,” Williams said on Tuesday’s call. “But because of August the 19th, we’ve been thrown into an arena where we have to do something to honor Amber.” 

She went on to say that Harris, who spoke with the Thurman family during an event with Oprah Winfrey in Michigan last month, “never asked was I Democratic or was I Republican.”

“She really wanted to know if I was okay,” Williams said. “I felt the genuineness, I felt the compassion.” 

Thurman’s sister, meanwhile, told the story of speaking to Amber on facetime just before she went into surgery, describing her face as “blue with patches.”

“That face just haunts me,” she said. 

Democrats have sought to lean into the issue of abortion and reproductive freedom since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022, as polls show a majority of the public disagrees with the decision. Voters have chosen to keep the practice more widely accessible when it has appeared on ballots in the two years since, even in ruby-red states like Kansas and Ohio. Democrats credit the issue, in part, for its better-than-expected showing in the 2022 midterm elections. 

ProPublica’s reporting in September that a state medical review committee in Georgia found the death of Thurman and one other woman “preventable” added another layer to the key election issue. Their cases were the first known abortion-related deaths since the Supreme Court reversed the national right to abortion. 

Trump appointed three of the justices who were in the majority in the decision that overturned Roe, which returned the power of if and how much to restrict the abortion to individual states and sparked near-total bans or restrictions in states around the country. 

“He bragged that he's the one who overturned Roe v Wade – we ought to give him full credit for that,” Warnock said. “And we ought to make him pay for it at the polls.”

On the campaign trail, Trump has sought to walk a fine line on the issue, praising that the decision is now back in the hands of states but criticizing six-week bans as too short and saying he would veto a national abortion ban.

"I'm not signing a ban, and there's no reason to sign a ban because we've gotten what everybody wanted," Trump said in September.

Democrats, however, maintain that he would sign a national ban should he be reelected and Congress puts a bill on his desk. 

The topic of abortion is expected to be discussed in the Fox News town hall, according to the network. The event, which was set to be taped Tuesday in Georgia, will be moderated by Fox News host Harris Faulkner and is set to air Wednesday morning.

There has been a growing conversation about a stark gender divide in this year’s election, with polls showing Trump holding an edge with men while Harris has the advantage with women. A survey by NBC News released on Sunday, for instance, showed Harris holding a 14-percentage point edge among women while Trump held a 16-point advantage among men. 

Warnock on Tuesday also hit back on Trump saying during a rally in September that he would be the “protector” of women. 

“We don’t need this serial sexual assaulter to protect women,” he said, referencing the former president being found liable of sexual abuse. “Women need to be protected from Donald Trump.”

Spectrum News' Ryan Chatelain contributed to this report.