by Cassandra Jaramillo, Kavitha Surana, Lizzie Presser and Ziva Branstetter

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Weeks after ProPublica reported on the deaths of two pregnant women whose miscarriages went untreated in Texas, state lawmakers have filed bills that would create new exceptions to the state’s strict abortion laws, broadening doctors’ ability to intervene when their patients face health risks.

The legislation comes after the lawmaker who wrote one of Texas’ recent abortion bans wrote an op-ed in the Houston Chronicle defending the current exceptions as “plenty clear.”

But more than 100 Texas OB-GYNs disagree with his position. In a public letter, written in response to ProPublica’s reporting, they urged changes. “As OB-GYNs in Texas, we know firsthand how much these laws restrict our ability to provide our patients with quality, evidence-based care,” they said.

Texas’ abortion ban threatens up to 99 years in prison, $100,000 in fines and loss of medical license for doctors who provide abortions. The state’s health and safety code currently includes exceptions if a pregnant woman “has a life-threatening physical condition aggravated by, caused by, or arising from a pregnancy that places the female at risk of death or poses a serious risk of substantial impairment of a major bodily function unless the abortion is performed or induced.” A separate exception exists that provides doctors with some legal protections if they perform an abortion for an ectopic pregnancy or in cases when a patient’s water breaks.

The bills, filed in the state House and Senate last week, create new health exceptions. They would allow doctors to induce or perform abortions necessary to preserve the mental or physical health of a patient, including preserving the patient’s fertility. Doctors could also provide abortions in cases where the fetus had an anomaly that would make it unable to survive outside the womb or able to survive only with “extraordinary medical interventions.”

State Rep. Donna Howard, who filed the bill in the Texas House, said ProPublica’s recent reporting adds to evidence that the current legislation is a threat to the safety of pregnant women in Texas and increases the urgency to make changes. “This is my reaction,” she said. “It’s one of extreme sadness and disbelief that we are at a point where we are allowing women to die because we haven’t been able to clarify the law,” she said.

Investigations by ProPublica have found that at least four women, including two in Texas, died after they could not access timely reproductive care in states that ban abortion. There are almost certainly others.

In Houston, Josseli Barnica died in September 2021, just days after the state’s six-week abortion ban went into effect. Barnica, 28, was miscarrying at 17 weeks, but doctors did not offer her the medical standard of care — to speed up labor or empty her uterus — for 40 hours, until after the fetal heartbeat had stopped. Her husband said she was told it would be a “crime” to intervene. This left her seriously exposed to infection, experts told ProPublica. Three days later, she died from an infection, leaving behind a young daughter.

Her death was “preventable,” according to more than a dozen medical experts who reviewed a summary of her hospital and autopsy records at ProPublica’s request; they called her case “horrific,” “astounding” and “egregious.”

The doctors involved in........

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