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Members of the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Accountability are asking Texas’ maternal mortality committee to brief them on the controversial decision to not review pregnancy and childbirth related deaths from the first two years after the state banned nearly all abortions.
The maternal mortality committee announced in September that it would not review deaths from 2022 and 2023, instead jumping ahead to 2024. At a recent meeting, committee chair and Houston OB/GYN Dr. Carla Ortique defended the decision as necessary to offer more contemporary recommendations on reducing maternal deaths.
But U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett, a Dallas-area Democrat, and three other members of the House Oversight Committee are questioning whether this decision was influenced by the “chilling effect on reproductive care” in Texas.
“Ignoring pregnancy-related deaths during one of the deadliest periods in Texas for pregnant women directly contradicts [the maternal mortality committee’s] statutorily required mission of eliminating preventable maternal deaths in Texas,” says the letter sent to the Texas Department of State Health Services Thursday morning.
The letter was signed by Crockett, ranking member Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Democrat from Maryland, Rep. Summer Lee, a Democrat from Pennsylvania, and Rep. Ayanna Pressley, a Democrat from Massachusetts.
They are requesting a briefing from the state health agency no later than Jan. 2. A spokesperson for the agency did not immediately respond to request for comment.
Noting that Texas was the first and largest state to implement an abortion ban, the letter says the state’s “top priority” should be analyzing maternal deaths from that period and sharing their findings with the Centers for Disease Control and other states.
Last year, Texas legislators allocated money to create a new maternal death tracking system with the goal of ending the state’s participation in national data sharing. Members of the committee, including Ortique, have raised concerns about this change and its impact on data gathering both in Texas and nationwide.
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The Texas Maternal Mortality and Morbidity Review Committee studies maternal deaths to better understand why so many women are dying or nearly dying from pregnancy and childbirth in Texas. The 23-member committee also issues recommendations to improve outcomes in its biennial report.
This year’s report, released in September, showed maternal deaths jumped in 2020 and 2021, reversing two years of improvement. Every group saw worsening outcomes, even with COVID deaths excluded, except for white women. Black women remain disproportionately impacted.
Many researchers and reproductive health
