Can’t have information that may make Republicans look bad come out before the election, now can we?
Health officials say they need more time to complete a report on maternal deaths — likely punting the fullest accounting of pregnancy-related deaths since the state’s abortion ban took effect until after the midterms.
The biennial report has historically been released on Sept. 1, but lawmakers were informed last week that it would not be completed by then. The Department of State Health Services said the report will be finished by Dec. 1 under a new deadline the state Legislature approved last year.
Advocates and Democrats say that will give lawmakers little time to craft bills for the next legislative session, which starts in January — and it will likely keep voters in the dark ahead of the high-stakes midterms.
The Texas House Women’s Health Caucus wrote to acting health commissioner Imelda Garcia on Wednesday urging her to release the findings sooner.
“The Department knows that releasing this report by September 1 is essential to the Legislature’s ability to act,” state Rep. Ann Johnson, a Houston Democrat, said in a statement. “Any further delay is not merely bureaucratic; it is an unconscionable dereliction of duty to Texas mothers and families.”
Democrats say the timing is suspicious, given the Dec. 1 deadline is after Gov. Greg Abbott and other Republicans who supported the state’s abortion ban are up for reelection.
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The women’s health caucus letter says the delay is “particularly disturbing” because lawmakers last session voted to eliminate redaction requirements that the committee had said previously slowed its work.
Minutes from the committee’s December meeting show it was on track to complete the report by Sept. 1. The minutes say the committee was set to finish reviewing 2024 cases by this May.
Nakeenya Wilson, a former member of the committee, said there is no obvious reason the committee would need more time. In the past, reports have been amended after publication to meet the Sept. 1 deadline.
“I don’t need to speculate about motive to know that Texans deserve an answer,” Wilson said. “DSHS told us in December that this report would be published by Sept. 1. They laid out a work plan that had case review ending in May and recommendations being completed in June. So what changed? What work remains? And why should Texans have to wait until after they elect a governor to see findings about preventable maternal deaths?”
The story refers to the report from 2022 and which contained data for 2018 through 2020, which was also delayed until December, also in a year where Greg Abbott was on the ballot. It was in December of 2024 that the committee announced that it would finally include 2022 and 2023 data, for the report this year. Not sure why this is called a “biennial” report when it either didn’t happen in 2024 or didn’t include any more recent data than the one two years before it, but here we are. We do already know of at least three deaths that can be directly blamed on the ban, plus plenty of near misses and cases of sepsis. Will any of that be in the report? We’ll have to wait until December to see. Daily Kos has more.