Texas Democratic lawmakers have waited years for data showing how the state’s near-total abortion ban affected maternal mortality numbers across the state. They’ll have to keep waiting.
So will voters.
State officials have pushed the release of a biennial report that analyzes the deaths of pregnant women in Texas, saying they hope to release it by the start of December — long past the date it was originally anticipated to come out, and weeks after Election Day.
It will be the first report containing data after Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022, and Democrats have been quick to accuse state officials of holding it back for political reasons as Republican candidates in the state face competitive challenges.
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“If the data came out and indicated that we are actually seeing more women who want their pregnancies are having complications, not getting the care that they need and even dying, that could get the attention of Republican women,” said Donna Howard, a Democrat who chairs the Texas Women’s Health Caucus in the statehouse. “[They] would very likely say, ‘You’ve gone too far, and you haven’t done enough.’”
Democrats in the state have urged the release of the report.
“Texans deserve full transparency about the maternal mortality crisis plaguing our state and country — including the release of the Department of State Health Services report,” said JT Ennis, a spokesperson for James Talarico, the Democratic candidate in the state’s U.S. Senate race.
The report has typically been released no later than the start of September. As recently as March, members of the Texas Maternal Mortality and Morbidity Review Committee acknowledged during a public meeting that they were working to meet that deadline. But state officials have seized on a state law passed in 2025 that extends the deadline for some health-related reports to Dec. 1 as part of a broader effort to streamline the state’s health agency publication process.
The author of that bill, Democratic Rep. Christian Manuel, told the Texas Observer he believes the extended deadline provision has been “weaponized to withhold information” from the public.
The information in the report could be powerful in motivating voters in the state, where a key Senate race is playing out between Talarico and Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton. Several House districts are also competitive, as is the governor’s race, where Republican Gov. Greg Abbott is facing unusually tight competition as he seeks a fourth term.
His opponent, Gina Hinojosa, has criticized the report’s delay.
“Greg Abbott delayed the release of the Maternal Mortality Report until after the election because he knows the results will be damning,” Hinojosa said in a statement to The Washington Sun.
As governor, Abbott has executive power over the Department of State Health Services and is able to appoint leadership and issue directives that guide policy enforcement.
In statements provided to The Sun, Abbott’s office and the Department of State Health Services denied that the report has been held back.
“There is no delay. Under HB 4666, which the Texas Legislature passed in an overwhelmingly bipartisan fashion, the deadline for DSHS to submit the report is Dec. 1,” said Andrew Mahaleris, Abbott’s press secretary, in a statement to The Sun.
The DSHS pointed to the same deadline.
The report “is proceeding through the DSHS internal review process,” a spokesperson for the department said in a statement. “As part of that process, the acting commissioner has asked the committee to strengthen the report by further describing its work around preventability, better defining the sources of its recommendations, and making clearer connections between the underlying data, findings, and recommendations.” The statement went on to say the agency is working through the revisions “with the goal” of releasing it by Dec. 1.
Alina Salganicoff, the director of Women’s Health Policy program at KFF, a nonpartisan health policy research organization, told The Sun that it’s “unclear” why Texas’ report would need additional time to be completed, and “other states are pretty routinely doing this type of analysis to address” the deaths of pregnant patients.
The biennial maternal mortality report has been delayed once before. In 2022, the release was similarly held until December, after Election Day had passed. Once released, the report, which analyzed deaths from the year 2019, before Texas’ abortion ban was in place, showed an increase in deaths of pregnant Black women.
While there is not yet state data to show how Texas’ abortion bans may have affected the deaths of pregnant patients, media outlets have reported instances of delayed care for some women. ProPublica has identified at least four pregnant Texas women who died in the year after the state’s abortion ban went into effect because they were denied care while experiencing pregnancy complications.
The number of women who have died after experiencing ectopic pregnancies spiked nationally following the Dobbs decision, further ProPublica reporting has found. The likelihood of death is nearly twice as high in states with abortion bans, the outlet found.
“Nobody wants to be the party of women dying,” said Lauren Peterson, the CEO of Abortion in America, an abortion advocacy organization whose legal arm is suing the state on behalf of the family of a woman who died after being denied abortion care. “If I were a politician who had advocated for the state’s abortion ban, I would surely not want people hearing these stories.”
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