The recent study, conducted by researchers at the University of Maryland, found that the state’s maternal mortality rate doubled between 2010 and 2012. Nonetheless, Texas legislators expressed a much more robust interest in drafting draconian anti-abortion laws that also prohibit donating fetal tissue to research.
Republican state senator Lois Kolkhorst actually tried to get something done, introducing a measure that would have extended the end date of Texas’s maternal mortality task force from 2019 to 2023, and allowed researchers to continue to study the specific causes of pregnancy-related deaths in Texas. The task force was established in 2013 amidst growing concerns that the pregnancy-related death rate was on the rise. But that measure failed.
The task force has already found that Texas’s growing pregnancy-related mortality rates disproportionately affect black women, who make up 11 percent of births, but 28 percent of pregnancy-related deaths in Texas.
Lawmakers also failed to pass a measure that would have extended Medicaid coverage to low-income mothers for longer periods after they’ve given birth. They did manage to pass a bill that allows mothers to be screened for postpartum depression a year after giving birth. But Lisa Hollier, the chairwoman of the maternal mortality task force, told the AP that this is hardly a victory. “I am concerned that we had the opportunity for some improvements,” she said, “and that opportunity may have passed us by.”
