Texas Officials Trying to Cover Up Data on Maternal Deaths Ahead of Midterms

In a very convenient delay for GOP candidates, Texas says it won’t have its first maternal mortality study since the 2022 Dobbs decision ready before midterm elections. Maternal mortality reports show how many pregnant women die each year and from what causes.  Almost assuredly the real reason for the delay is to continue to obscure just how deadly Texas’s near-total abortion ban has been.  Texas definitely doesn’t need damning statistics floating around while anti-abortion extremists like GOP Senate nominee Ken Paxton are flailing.

Indeed, Texas has been dragging its feet on this data for a while. The data they got around to releasing in January 2025 was so old that it predated the state’s abortion ban.   The state has also announced that when they release the new report after the midterms, they’re just not going to analyze data from 2022 and 2023, because this is how we do things now: just a persistent and deadly lack of accountability.

Though Texas has tried to keep this on the down-low, we know from reporting that by late 2024, three women had died during miscarriages when care was delayed or denied. We know that sepsis, which is life-threatening, skyrocketed after Texas banned abortion. We know that more pregnant women have nearly bled to death than ever before.

Overall, women are nearly twice as likely to die in states with abortion bans versus states where abortion is legal, according to a 2025 study from the Gender Equity Policy Institute. And even before that, the United States already had a higher maternal mortality rate than its peer nations.

Texas isn’t alone in trying to keep these numbers under wraps.

Florida has stopped having the state’s Maternal Mortality Review Committee say much of anything anymore, and it was only after a reporter asked that the state uploaded data for 2021, 2022, and 2023. Florida also refuses to release the names of the people on the committee, and it does not provide notice of its meetings, agendas, or minutes. It’s about as secret as you can get.

Idaho disbanded its maternal mortality review committee in 2023, straight-up deciding that the deaths of pregnant women aren’t even worth keeping track of, much less preventing.

In 2024, Georgia dismissed all 32 members of its maternal mortality committee because reporters got internal documents showing that two women’s deaths were tied to the state’s six-week abortion ban. Who replaced those committee members? Georgia has refused to say, as of the most recent news on the matter, which dates to early 2025.

And in 2024, Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders got mad at the maternal mortality committee for caring about pregnant people and recommending that postpartum women qualify for extended Medicaid coverage, so she made her own “advisory” group.

These people do not care if women die as long as they can burnish their anti-abortion bona fides, but they’re too chicken to show us the data proving how successful their policies really are—successful at killing people, that is.