It’s not enough, and it’s also not anywhere close to addressing the real problem.
The Texas Medical Board has disciplined three doctors ProPublica previously investigated whose patients died after receiving delayed or inappropriate pregnancy care under the state’s strict abortion ban.
Two of the doctors failed to properly intervene as a pregnant teenager repeatedly sought care for life-threatening complications, the board found. The third did not provide a dilation and curettage procedure to empty a miscarrying patient’s uterus, and she ultimately bled to death.
As ProPublica investigated those preventable deaths and five others across three states in the past few years, reporters found that abortion bans have influenced how doctors and hospitals respond to pregnancy complications. Facing risks of prison time and professional ruin, doctors have delayed key interventions until they can document that a fetus’ heart is no longer beating or that a case meets a narrow legal exception. Some physicians say their colleagues are discharging or transferring pregnant patients instead of taking responsibility for their care.
Doctors and lawyers have questioned why medical boards, which oversee physician licensing and investigate substandard care, have not played a more active role in guiding doctors on how to uphold medical standards within the constraints of the law. When asked by ProPublica in 2024 what recourse miscarrying patients had when a doctor denied them necessary treatment, the president of the Texas Medical Board said it had no say over criminal law but that patients could file a complaint and “vote with their feet” to seek care from another doctor.
Since then, the Texas board has taken more steps than those in other states, publishing guidance this year that provides case studies on how doctors can legally provide abortions to patients with certain medical complications. The state Legislature ordered the board to create the training materials as part of the Life of the Mother Act, which was passed after ProPublica’s reporting and made modest adjustments to the state’s abortion restrictions in an attempt to prevent additional maternal deaths.
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Maternal care experts say health care providers will continue to hesitate to offer standard care as long as bans carry serious criminal consequences — Texas’ law can put a physician behind bars for 99 years. But those who spoke to ProPublica say that medical board sanctions are one of the few levers that can provide a counterweight, pushing hospitals and doctors to provide standard care despite uncertainty over vaguely written laws.
Michelle Maloney, who is representing the families of both Texas patients in malpractice lawsuits, said she was pleasantly surprised by the board’s recent actions. “Over the course of my career, I’ve had many horrific, horrific death cases. For someone to get disciplined by the medical board, especially while there’s ongoing litigation, is just extraordinarily rare,” she said.
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Reproductive rights advocates welcomed the Texas board’s recent actions but said that it and medical boards in other states should do more. None of the Texas discipline orders, for example, directly sanction a doctor for failing to offer or provide an abortion for a high-risk medical condition.
The board has disciplined some doctors in recent years for failing to provide D&Cs to patients after a confirmed miscarriage or for substandard care of pregnant patients experiencing emergencies, and the orders are typically released quietly. The board could be making public statements and sharing more robust guidance to remind doctors of the consequences, said Molly Duane, the litigation director of Amplify Legal, which is part of the reproductive rights advocacy group Abortion in America.
“They should be saying loudly: This is what can happen if you don’t provide care in these circumstances,” Duane said. At the Center for Reproductive Rights, Duane represented 20 Texas women in a case against the state who alleged doctors inappropriately denied them abortions during medical emergencies. The Texas Supreme Court sided with the state and blamed doctors for misinterpreting the law. Duane is not aware of any doctors in those cases who received discipline from the board.
Read the article and see here and here for more on Porsha Ngumezi and Nevaeh Crane, whose doctors were among those punished. It’s clear from this story that this is a story of malpractice and mistreatment of these women by their doctors, and they died as a result. As far as that goes, that the doctors did receive some consequences is a good thing, albeit an insufficient one. To whatever this can improve things for women in the future, that’s also good. But hanging over all of it is the undeniable fact that any doctor in the position these doctors were in has to make the decision to risk being harassed and arrested, not just by Ken Paxton or potentially the even worse Republican wannabees running to succeed him, but also by rogue prosecutors and litigious forced-birth zealot lawyers, all of whom are empowered by our state’s insane and deeply harmful anti-abortion laws. The Texas Medical Board is scapegoat dressed up to look like a reasoned enforcement mechanism so that the forces that are truly responsible for what’s going on here can keep operating in the shadows. Say it with me again: Nothing will change until the people in charge of our state are changed.