Advocates for Black maternal health want Texas to release mortality report this year
Advocates for Black maternal health are asking the state health department to immediately release a report on maternal mortality in Texas.
Every two years, the state’s Maternal Mortality and Morbidity Review Committee works with the state health department to publish a report on pregnancy-related deaths, a document that serves as a touchstone for activists and lawmakers trying to reverse the country’s growing maternal mortality rate.
The report was scheduled to be published Sept. 2. Instead, it will likely be published in summer 2023, said Dr. John Hellerstedt, the outgoing commissioner of the Department of State Health Services.
Health officials have said that postponing the report’s publication will allow for a more complete set of data; in this case, a review of all pregnancy-associated and pregnancy-related deaths in the 2019 calendar year.
Activists have countered that the information is too urgent to wait to publish, and that the preliminary findings can help health care providers immediately, and lawmakers during the upcoming legislative session.
“It’s after elections, it’s after the legislative session,” said Nakeenya Wilson, a Fort Worth native and member of the committee responsible for producing the report. “People are extremely frustrated.”
Since 2014, the state’s Maternal Mortality and Morbidity Review Committee has released a report every two years after reviewing hundreds of cases of new mothers who died at some point during pregnancy or in the year after. Committee members are tasked with answering an urgent, difficult question: “If she had not been pregnant, would she have died?”
The committee works with the state health department to understand what caused each mother’s death and whether it was preventable. The committee’s previous report analyzed deaths from 2013, meaning that the analysis currently available to the public stems from data that is almost a decade old.
But the delayed analysis reviews deaths from the 2019 calendar year, providing a more recent investigation into maternal mortality in Texas.
“The delay is because the Review Committee is still in the middle of reviewing cases of maternal death from 2019, and we want to be able to present a full year of information in the report,” DSHS spokesman Chris Van Deusen said in an email.
He added that the committee’s work is time consuming; it requires obtaining records from doctors and hospitals and reviewing the records and finding relevant information before the cases even go to the committee for review.
The committee needs to review at least another 31 deaths from 2019, a DSHS official said. All 31 of those cases need to be reviewed by the committee so they can determine whether pregnancy or childbirth contributed to the deaths.
But the committee has previously published preliminary reports that are updated as new data becomes available, said Amy Raines-Milenkov, a member of the committee.
“Why can’t we just put it out as preliminary and then come back with an addendum?” asked Raines-Milenkov, who is also an associate professor at Fort Worth’s Texas College of Osteopathic Medicine.
Wilson, who is the committee member’s sole community advocate, discussed the report with a room full of Fort Worth community members during a conversation on Black maternal health Thursday night in Fort Worth.
Black women are at least three times more likely to die during or after pregnancy than white women, according to research from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Black women at Thursday’s event discussed how racism in the healthcare system and other sectors of life affect their health, and how to demand more from doctors and legislators.
Fort Worth resident Khanay Turner said the information was necessary for lawmakers to consider reforms like extending Medicaid coverage for new moms. Turner said she was worried about her own safety and the safety of her peers, and that the report could help lawmakers pass laws and fund programs to make pregnancy and childbirth safer.
The committee has repeatedly recommended that Texas extend Medicaid coverage for new moms, so that they have publicly-funded health insurance for at least a year after childbirth. The committee’s previous reports have identified that deaths related to pregnancy can happen months after birth, and that continuous health insurance coverage could protect moms during that period.
Raines-Milenkov, who also works with UNT HSC’s Healthy Start program, said grassroots organizers, nonprofits, and providers can begin immediately implementing recommendations when they are released. In the last report, for example, the committee recommended greater education about the postpartum period for new moms, and more outreach to Black communities in Texas.
Both of those ideas, Raines-Milenkov said, were ones that didn’t require policy action by lawmakers, but could be used by smaller groups immediately.
Clarification: This story was updated Sept. 27 to more accurately reflect the event on Black maternal health in Fort Worth.
This story was originally published September 19, 2022 at 6:00 AM.
