Any legit pro-life medical review committee would be clamoring to review the skyrocketing rate of maternal and infant deaths in Texas since its abortion ban. That is, unless the forced-birth crowd doesn’t want Texans to know that the “pro-life” law is killing women and babies.
The Washington Post:
The Texas committee that examines all pregnancy-related deaths in the state will not review cases from 2022 and 2023, the first two years after Texas’s near-total abortion ban took effect, leaving any potential deaths related to abortion bans during those years uninvestigated by the 23 doctors, medical professionals and other specialists who make up the group.
The decision by the Texas Maternal Mortality and Morbidity Review Committee was supposedly done to make their review “more contemporary,” and skip over a backlog that will allow “more relevant recommendations to policymakers,” as The Post put it.
It’s hard to think of what could be more relevant and contemporary than looking into pregnancy-related deaths since the abortion ban. Especially since we already know horrific stories of women dying or forced to flee the state after being denied life-saving care, thanks to the law. That’s not counting the spike in rape-related pregnancies.
OB/GYN Veronica Gillispie-Bell, described as a “national expert on maternal health,” told The Post that the committee’s rationale “doesn’t sound like an explanation that makes sense.”
Well, it makes total sense if you don’t want the public to know that a law sold as protecting life is actually causing deaths.
Coincidentally, other “pro-life” states look like they’re trying to hide the fatal results, too.
More from WaPo:
Other maternal mortality committees in states with abortion bans have faced significant turbulence since the fall of Roe. In Idaho — a state with a near-total abortion ban — the Republican-led legislature dissolved the state’s committee in 2023. While the committee was reestablished with a law passed earlier this year, the situation has resulted in significant delays in the review process.
And in Georgia last week, the state’s public health commissioner dismissed all members of the state’s maternal mortality committee after ProPublica obtained confidential information about two deaths that occurred in the state, where abortion is banned after six weeks of pregnancy.
