Texas Republicans won’t allow lawmakers, public know how many people the abortion ban is killing

Texas’s ban on abortions after six weeks has been in effect for about a year now, since the U.S. Supreme Court decided, from the shadow docket, to let it happen. Since then, the Court has overturned federal abortion protections, and Texas’s near-total ban has been enacted. Now it appears that Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s administration is actively covering up any deaths that have occurred because of the forced birth laws.

The House Chronicle reports that the state’s health officials missed a  deadline to report the first major update of pregnancy-related deaths in the state in almost a decade. The report was supposed to have been issued on Sept. 1, but now has been delayed indefinitely. By “indefinitely,” Texas officials seem to mean “until after the election of 2022 and maybe the one in 2024.”

State lawmakers are working with nine-year-old data on maternal death, and now likely will be until the 2025 biennial legislative session because the state says it probably won’t be able to release the updated information until after next year’s session. Whether the Department of State Health Services (DSHS) is truly just sitting on the data, or the agency really doesn’t have enough staff and enough funding to have finished the review on time, as DSHS commissioner Dr. John Hellerstedt told the state’s Maternal Mortality and Morbidity Review Committee, the result is the same. The data isn’t available and won’t be for months, possibly longer.

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