Texas Maternal Mortality Committee Will Conveniently Skip Data From 2022 to 2023

The dystopian saga of states that have banned abortions and are now attempting to erase the impacts of their laws continues. On Tuesday, the Washington Post reported that Texas’ maternal mortality committee has conveniently — for the state, at least — opted against analyzing mortality data from 2022 to 2023. Those are the first full years after Texas enacted a six-week abortion ban in September 2021, then a total ban in 2022 immediately after the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health ruling. Hmm, I wonder why the state doesn’t want the public to learn about pregnancy-related deaths post-Dobbs!

Committee members are appointed by the head of the Texas Health and Human Services Commission, who’s appointed by the governor. Texas’ governor, you’ll recall, is none other than Greg Abbott, one of the most rabidly anti-abortion politicians in the country who justified his state abortion ban’s lack of rape exceptions by saying he'd simply “[eliminate] rape.” (As Mother Jones pointed out earlier this year, that predictably hasn't worked at all, as researchers estimated in January that there have been 26,300 pregnancies as a result of rape in the state since Dobbs.)

According to the Post’s reporting this week, the decision to just… ignore data from the last two years came after a September meeting in which committee leaders determined they wanted their analysis to “be more contemporary” and review more recent deaths. This, of course, does not make any sense, and further explanation from the state’s top health officials didn’t help. “In 2024, the committee provided recommendations based on findings from maternal deaths that occurred in 2020,” Jennifer Shuford, commissioner of the Texas Department of State Health Services, wrote in a September letter about the decision. The committee’s recommendations should be “based on the most recent case cohorts available.”

Just this week, ProPublica reported on a third Texas woman who died in 2023 after a hospital delayed urgently needed abortion care; the two women before her died in 2021 shortly after the six-week ban. Dozens of Texas women have come forward with stories of their health and lives being endangered by being denied emergency abortions. While Texas’ abortion ban claims to offer an exception for threats to the pregnant person’s life, doctors, who face the threat of life in prison, have stressed that it’s unclear when they can actually act, and sometimes, it's too late.

The Post spoke to members of the committee who anonymously expressed concerns about the implications of this decision, which could obscure urgent public health realities and impact policy recommendations — though it’s not as if Texas Republicans have ever been much concerned with public health guidelines. “If women are dying because of delays, and we have this huge new policy in Texas that affects their lives, why would we skip over those years?” one member said.

Just last week, ProPublica reported that Georgia disbanded its entire maternal mortality committee. Their dismissal was retaliation for sharing two cases of abortion-banned deaths with the outlet, which published reports about those cases in September. Before that, in 2023, Idaho allowed its maternal mortality review committee legislation to expire, which effectively disbanded the committee. Eventually, following public outrage, the state reestablished the committee earlier this year, but only appointed members to fill it earlier this month.

Texas’ maternal mortality committee also made headlines in May, when Shuford appointed anti-abortion Dr. Ingrid Skop to the committee. Skop falsely claimed to Congress in 2021 that child rape victims as young as nine or 10 years old can safely carry a pregnancy to term to the state’s maternal review committee. Meanwhile, Nakeenya Wilson, the committee's only community advocate, wasn't reappointed this year after she spoke out against Texas for barring them from releasing data during an election year in 2022. 

In September, the Gender Equity Policy Institute reported that maternal deaths in Texas increased by 56% between 2019 and 2022, compared to an 11% increase nationwide during the same time period. The organization’s president attributed this sharp spike directly to Texas’ 2021 abortion ban. For years, all data has pointed to abortion restrictions endangering maternal health. And now, anti-abortion government officials are doing everything they can to stop that data from coming to light.