I will be watching this closely.
The family of Tierra Walker, who died of preeclampsia at the age of 37 when she was 20 weeks pregnant, has filed a lawsuit in Texas, saying she was denied an abortion that could have saved her life as her health quickly deteriorated.
Lawyers for Walker’s family filed the lawsuit Tuesday in Bexar County District Court accusing Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, several of her doctors and others of “deliberate indifference, discrimination, and medical mistreatment [that] ultimately caused her horrific and tragic death” in 2024. Preeclampsia is a severe high blood pressure condition in pregnancy that can be fatal.
Walker’s family alleges Paxton — a Republican who is currently running for Senate — and another defendant, Stephen Brint Carlton, executive director of the Texas Medical Board, stripped her of her right to life by imposing “a merciless blanket prohibition” on abortion, while the doctors allegedly failed to offer life-saving medical treatment.
Paxton has been outspoken in his defense of Texas’ near-total abortion ban. He has filed lawsuits against doctors and organizations who ship abortion pills to Texas from out of state. His office has not responded to CBS News’ request for comment.
“At every turn, Texas’s political and medical establishments not only failed but actively harmed Ms. Walker,” the lawsuit alleges.
“Tierra Walker is dead because not one of her … healthcare providers would give her the one medical procedure that would have saved her life,” Michelle Maloney, an attorney representing the family, told CBS News. They refused, she said, because of what she called “the immense culture of fear” that has developed around abortion in the state of Texas since the near-total ban came into effect in 2022.
ProPublica was first to report on the circumstances of Walker’s death.
[…]
Walker learned she was nearly eight weeks pregnant on Sept. 19, 2024, during an emergency room visit.
She had been working to get her health back on track after struggling with chronic health problems for years, including obesity, high blood pressure, asthma and Type 2 diabetes. Three years earlier, she had developed preeclampsia while pregnant with twins, which led to the stillbirth of her twins and “sent her into a health spiral,” the lawsuit says.
By mid-2024, her health was improving — her blood pressure was lower and she was losing weight with the help of a GLP-1 drug.
An emergency room doctor noted in Walker’s medical records it was “too early in pregnancy to have eclampsia” and she was sent home after her blood pressure medications were adjusted to account for her pregnancy.
She returned to the hospital hours later as she continued to have seizures, nausea, vomiting and complained of pain. Her medical records noted that her seizures may have been triggered by several factors, including pregnancy-related nausea, anxiety and stress.
She was hospitalized for most of October, where medical records show she received extensive testing for her seizures, which doctors noted were non-epileptic “functional seizures,” unrelated to her pregnancy or preeclampsia.
Her records show she was surrounded by family members for nearly the entirety of her hospital stay, and that she was repeatedly offered mental health and psychiatric treatments for anxiety.
“They really treated her so bad because they thought she was crazy,” her aunt LaTanya Walker told CBS News. “One day they told me to tell her husband, ‘Can you go tell him that this is all in her head?'”
During the lengthy hospital stay in October, according to the lawsuit, Walker and her family told medical staff “that the pregnancy was going to cost Ms. Walker her life, and asked if she could terminate the pregnancy.”
According to Maloney, Tierra Walker first asked for an abortion at another hospital on Oct. 12, and then asked at University Health on Oct. 30, when she would have been about 11 weeks pregnant.
“Despite the clear risk to her life in continuing the pregnancy, none of University Health’s staff counseled Ms. Walker on the possibility of abortion as a life-saving medical treatment, offered her this treatment, or suggested that she leave the state. Instead, hospital staff kept insisting ‘nothing is wrong with the baby’ and continued to refuse the care that she needed on that basis,” the lawsuit alleges.
In late October and early November, two doctors documented in Walker’s medical records that she was at “high” risk of death.
Still, she was discharged from the hospital, only to be readmitted days later.
“I asked them time and time again to give her an abortion. And they would tell me … ‘It’s her, but it’s not the baby,'” LaTanya Walker said.
The lawsuit claims hospital staff responded to her requests for an abortion by saying, “Your baby is fine,” while allegedly “disregarding Ms. Walker’s deteriorating health.”
In a statement to CBS News, the Texas Medical Board said that under its current rules, “when addressing a condition that is or may become emergent, a physician is not required to wait until a mother’s life is in immediate danger or her major bodily function is at immediate risk before providing necessary medical care” and noted that in some circumstances, that care “may include the termination of a pregnancy.
Tierra Walker is far from the first woman to die as a result of Texas’ abortion ban, but her death the first that I know of to result in a lawsuit like this. I must have missed that ProPublica story when it first came out last November, but it was linked to in this story about the Texas Medical Board’s mostly useless “how not to get sent to jail by Ken Paxton for abortion-related stuff” training. Which I said was useless because there was nothing in law, policy, rhetoric, or anything else that would stop or even discourage Ken Paxton from going after anyone or anything he thought was doing something he didn’t approve of.
The party line from Republicans has always been that any problems relating to their sociopathic law is entirely due to doctors and hospitals misinterpreting it, and so nothing is their fault. I’m sure that will be the defense they push if this makes it into a courtroom. I am of course hopeful that Tierra Walker’s family will get some kind of justice out of this, but I fear that this will not survive first contact with the Fifth Circuit. But I will keep an eye on it. In the meantime, read that ProPublica story about what happened to Tierra Walker, and remember her name. The Trib, the Chron, KEN5, and The 19th have more.
UPDATE: It has been pointed out to me that this suit was filed in state district court, not federal, and so the Fifth Circuit will not be involved. I’m still wary about the possible outcomes, but I am very glad for that.