TURNING A BLIND EYE?
ATX in Context
Bridget Grumet Austin American-Statesman USA TODAY NETWORK
Before their names became etched on tombstones, Porsha Ngumezi and Nevaeh Crain were excited mothers-to-be. Ngumezi, a charter school finance manager in the Houston area, hoped to give her two sons a baby sister. Crain, a recent high school graduate who lived in East Texas, was expecting her first child.
But these women had the deadly misfortune of suffering miscarriages in 2023, after Texas’ strict abortion bans went into effect and doctors and hospitals became hesitant to provide standard miscarriage care.
Ngumezi’s heart stopped in June 2023 after hours of heavy bleeding that wasn’t properly treated. Crain, ravaged by infection, died of organ failure that October, despite pleading for help in three trips to hospital emergency rooms over a 20-hour period.
Recent reporting by ProPublica brought their stories to light. Yet their cases — and who knows how many others from 2022 and 2023 — will never appear in the official review by Texas’ Maternal Mortality and Morbidity Review Committee, the state panel tasked with studying serious complications and pregnancy-related deaths in order to inform lawmakers.
The stated reasons are frustratingly bureaucratic. Buried in a yearslong backlog, the committee decided to drop all 2022 and 2023 cases. Its next report, slated to be published by
September 2026, will contain the 2021 cases already under review, then jump ahead to 2024 cases. “We just need to move forward, to have the most recent, the most actionable information that the review committee can make,” Chris Van Deusen, a spokesman for the Texas Department of State Health Services, told me after The Washington Post first reported the committee’s decision last week.
He noted the report published by the committee this year covered cases from 2019 and 2020, providing data that now feels out-of-date. “We can’t be as far behind as we have been,” Van Deusen said. The backlog is real, but this solution is deeply troubling. Skipping over 2022 and 2023 erases an essential study of the earliest years under Texas’ abortion bans.
At best, it deprives lawmakers of a key review to help them improve their policies. At worst, it quietly absolves those who championed Texas’ abortion bans by keeping two years’ worth of the collateral damage out of view.
Van Deusen said skipping over 2022 and 2023 “had nothing to do with the abortion issue, or trying to hide that or suppress that in any way.”
But you can see why others are skeptical. “We just have to read all the stories out there about women who have not received all the necessary treatment for complications in pregnancy,” state Rep. Donna Howard, D-Austin, who chairs the Texas Women’s Health Caucus in the Texas House, told me this week. “It’s clear there is politically damaging information that would be discovered if those cases were analyzed.”
Even if you take the committee at its word, this is the wrong approach. If Texas has so many dangerous and deadly pregnancies that researchers are struggling to keep up, we should be studying more of this problem, not less of it.
Instead, as my colleague Bayliss Wagner reported earlier this year, Texas law prohibits the Maternal Mortality and Morbidity Review Committee from examining any deaths involving a person who recently had an abortion.
And now, in skipping all other cases from 2022 and 2023, the committee is looking away from Ngumezi, Crain and who knows how many others like them — women who were carrying muchwanted pregnancies, only to suffer complications or die because they couldn’t get the miscarriage care they needed.
Plus, going forward, the committee will no longer review all cases of maternal complications and deaths, but a representative sample. Other states use this approach, handling annual reviews swiftly so the committee doesn’t get backlogged again.
Had the new sampling methodology been in place for the last report, epidemiologist Savannah Larimore told the committee in September, it would have taken only nine months (instead of 27) to review 2019 cases, and only 12 months (instead of 32) to review 2020 cases.
But we sacrifice the full picture — a study of all cases — in the process.
Each legislative session brings new laws that reach further into the lives of pregnant Texans, sometimes fatefully so. Yet instead of finding ways to examine the full impact — by bringing more researchers on board, for instance — Texas is paring back its reviews.
A deadly problem grows, and our official documentation of it shrinks.
Grumet is the Statesman’s Metro columnist. Her column, ATX in Context, contains her opinions. Share yours via email at bgrumet@ statesman.com, or via X or Bluesky at @bgrumet. Find her previous work at statesman. com/opinion/columns.
