Maternal mortality committee to review abortion-related deaths

HOUSTON – Texas Public Radio reports that Texas’ maternal mortality committee should be allowed to review abortion-related deaths and have more voices from impacted communities at the table, the group’s chair said at a Friday meeting. These comments represent the committee’s most forceful critique yet of the system by which the state reviews deaths related to pregnancy and childbirth. Dr. Carla Ortique, a Houston OB/GYN who chairs the committee, called for the reversal of recent legislative changes that redrew committee membership and began the process to remove Texas from the federal maternal mortality tracking system. She said the Legislature should consider lifting the redaction requirements that keep these deaths anonymous and allow the committee to review deaths related to abortion, which they learned in March had been excluded from their files for more than a decade.

“Each maternal death, each life that is lost, has value,” she said. “We can’t make comments about what caused an increase in maternal death in our state if we’re not really reviewing all of them.” These calls for reform come amid a recent report showing a significant spike in maternal deaths in 2020 and 2021, reversing several years of improvements. The data from this report documents the period before the state banned nearly all abortions, which is expected to increase maternal mortality. This month, ProPublica reported on two Georgia women who died after they couldn’t access legal abortions and timely medical care because of the state’s abortion restrictions. Georgia’s maternal mortality committee deemed those deaths to be preventable, public records show. Dr. Ghazaleh Moayedi, a Dallas OB-GYN, abortion provider and chair of Physicians for Reproductive Health, told The Texas Tribune she is certain there are similar stories in Texas, a state three times as large as Georgia with even stricter abortion laws. “The framing around these being the first recorded deaths is deeply painful, because I know there are people that have died right here, but their stories are never going to be told in that way,” she said.