ICYMI
ICYMI: Reproductive Freedom for All President and CEO Responds to Tierra Walker’s Death in Houston Chronicle
Houston Chronicle: Pregnancy put Tierra’s life at risk. She saw 90 doctors. Not one offered an abortion
Recent reporting from ProPublica revealed 37-year-old Tierra Walker died a preventable death at Methodist Hospital Northeast near San Antonio after she was repeatedly denied access to an abortion. According to ProPublica, more than 90 doctors were involved in Walker’s care, but not one offered her the option to end her pregnancy.
Walker repeatedly asked her doctors for lifesaving abortion care due to preexisting conditions that put her at risk for severe complications. She had developed a dangerous case of preeclampsia in a previous pregnancy, leading to the stillbirth of her twins.
In response to this horrifying news, Reproductive Freedom for All launched a projection outside of the Texas Capitol in Austin to call out the deadly impact of Texas’ near-total abortion ban.
Read more from Mini Timmaraju in the Houston Chronicle in Response:
Houston Chronicle: Pregnancy put Tierra’s life at risk. She saw 90 doctors. Not one offered an abortion
By: Mini Timmaraju, Reproductive Freedom for All President and CEO
On his 14th birthday — December 30, 2024 — JJ found his mother’s lifeless body.
“‘I need you,’ he shouted as he leaned over his mom, pressing down on her chest. ‘I need you!’”
That scene is from a heartbreaking new ProPublica story about 37-year-old Tierra Walker’s needless death.
JJ and Tierra lived in San Antonio. Tierra, a dental assistant, was 20 weeks pregnant. Pre-existing diabetes and high blood pressure put her at high risk for severe complications — complications that she knew all too much about. When she’d been pregnant before, preeclampsia had resulted in the stillbirth of her twins.
This pregnancy had been even rockier rocky, rocky, and she was experiencing high blood pressure. She had unexplained seizures and a life-threatening blood clot in her leg. She spent weeks in the hospital.
ProPublica reports that more than 90 doctors were involved in Tierra’s case — and that Tierra asked directly whether she should have an abortion to protect her health. She thought that the Texas ban on abortions didn’t apply if carrying a baby put the mother’s life in danger.
But not one of those 90 doctors offered her an abortion.
In reviewing Tierra’s case for Pro Publica, more than a dozen OB-GYNs agree that not only should her doctors have provided the abortion she asked for, they should have proactively offered her this option. Those experts described her condition as a “ticking time bomb,” and all came to the same chilling conclusion: If Tierra had been able to end her pregnancy, she would not have died.
Now, JJ will grow up without his mother.
Since Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022, maternal mortality has increased dramatically in Texas, where abortion is now illegal. Black women like Tierra disproportionately bear the weight of this crisis.
Since her death, Texas has amended its abortion law. A woman’s emergency still needs to be “life-threatening” for her to qualify for an abortion, but it no longer needs to be “imminent.”
Doctors, though, say that the change isn’t enough — that for fear of being accused of breaking Texas law, hospitals and medical professionals hesitate to offer and provide abortions to women with dangerous chronic conditions.
This means that as abortion bans like Texas’ remain in place, more families like Tierra’s will be ripped apart.
Amber Nicole Thurman, Candi Miller, Josseli Barnica, Porsha Ngumezi, and Nevaeh Crain all died because of their states’ extreme abortion bans. We remember their names, and we carry their stories with us.
And these are only the stories we know about. It’s become harder to investigate pregnancy-related deaths. Shortly after the reporting of Amber and Candi’s deaths in Georgia, all members of the state’s Maternal Mortality Review Committee were dismissed, and the new members are being kept secret.
Texas, too, has skipped comprehensive reviews of key maternal mortality and morbidity data in the years 2021 to 2024 – which includes the immediate aftermath of overturning Roe v. Wade.
Preventable deaths from abortion bans are not just medical failures. They are moral and legal failures. Abortion bans are deadly, and vague, poorly defined “exceptions” simply don’t work. The only way to protect people like Tierra is to put medical decisions back where they belong: in the hands of patients and their providers, not their elected officials.
Needless deaths cannot become our new normal. Every death from an abortion ban is shocking and unacceptable. And any politician not actively working to repeal Texas’ abortion ban is complicit in those deaths.
Honoring Tierra means telling her story. It also means demanding more from the lawmakers who failed her and refusing to let them be absolved of their culpability.
Tierra deserved better. Texans deserve better.
We must elect lawmakers who will restore and protect our fundamental freedoms. The damage can never be undone. But we can stop deaths like Tierra’s in the future.
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For over 55 years, Reproductive Freedom for All (formerly NARAL Pro-Choice America) has fought to protect and advance reproductive freedom at the federal and state levels—including access to abortion care, birth control, pregnancy and post-partum care, and paid family leave—for everybody. Reproductive Freedom for All is powered by its more than 4 million members from every state and congressional district in the country, representing the 8 in 10 Americans who support legal abortion.