Not at this time, and not if it can help it.
Texas officials will not investigate pregnancy-related deaths for 2022 and 2023, skipping over the years immediately following the state’s controversial abortion ban, which critics say has led to more dangerous and sometimes fatal pregnancies.
The state’s Maternal Mortality and Morbidity Review Committee, which announced the decision this fall after years of trying to catch up on its count, said it was jumping ahead to provide “more contemporary” data for state lawmakers.
Dr. Carla Ortique, who chairs the committee, said the Texas Department of State Health Services will still release some mortality data from 2022 and 2023, even though the committee is not providing in-depth analysis of causes and trends. Reached for comment this week, Ortique said the committee had been planning to skip forward since earlier this year.
The move comes after the committee delayed the release of its last major review, in 2022, which showed a higher rate of life-threatening hemorrhaging among Black women during childbirth in Texas through 2020. Critics at the time accused Gov. Greg Abbott, who appoints the committee members, of pushing it off until after his reelection bid.
The committee now says its 2024 review, which would be the first glimpse into impacts from the period after the fall of Roe v. Wade, will be ready sometime in 2026, the same year Abbott could run for a record-setting fourth term.
The decision, first reported by The Washington Post, has caused an uproar among some Democrats and women’s health advocates. Nakeenya Wilson, a former member of the committee whose position was eliminated by the state Legislature last year, said that while ideally the committee would be up-to-date, compared to other states, it’s not “uncommon or unusual” for it to be a year or two behind.
After Roe v. Wade was overturned in the summer of 2022, Texas moved to ban nearly all abortions except those that endanger the life of the mother. At least two pregnant Texans have died since then, which experts said could have been avoided had they had access to abortion care, according to reporting from ProPublica. Another Texas woman died under similar circumstances in 2021, just after Texas had implemented an earlier version of its ban that prohibited abortions after roughly six weeks of pregnancy, according to ProPublica.
Advocates have expected the abortion bans to increase maternal deaths as more women will carry pregnancies to term. Black women die at higher rates during childbirth than white women and other groups in Texas and nationally.
Wilson, who is Black and experienced life-threatening complications during childbirth, said she hopes the committee’s decision wasn’t politically motivated. Whatever the cause, she said, the effect is still that it “manipulates” the numbers to policymakers’ benefit.
“Data tells a story, and we’re silencing the data,” Wilson said, adding that state leaders who support the abortion ban have claimed publicly that it’s saving lives and helping families. “Anything in the data that could counter that narrative doesn’t serve them.”
See here for the previous report, released in 2022, and here for my most recent post on the topic, which discussed how tracking this data post-SB8 was going to be a challenge. I wish I had something good to say here. None of this is surprising. They have the power to do this, so they will. That’s about all there is to it.
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This entry was posted in The great state of Texas and tagged abortion, Centers for Disease Control, maternal mortality, Nakeenya Wilson, SCOTUS, Texas, Texas Department of State Health Services, Texas Maternal Mortality and Morbidity Task Force, The Lege. Bookmark the permalink.