In Texas, an already dire Black maternal health crisis is colliding with some of the nation’s harshest abortion bans, creating what one advocate calls a “state-designed disaster.” Writer and advocate raven E. Freeborn points to the death of Texas mother Tierra Walker, who died after being denied lifesaving abortion care, as the clearest sign that “Texas has manufactured a reproductive health crisis.” In their view, compounding abortion restrictions have lowered the standard of medical care “to denial, refusal, and what can only be assumed as ambivalence.”
A ProPublica investigation into deaths of pregnant people denied abortions, along with a viral video of Karrie Jones’s medical neglect during childbirth, reveals what Freeborn calls a vicious cycle: the maternal health crisis and abortion denials “are mutually reinforcing failures,” abandoning Black pregnant people “from all sides.” Texas’ Maternal Mortality Committee has announced it will not review maternal deaths from 2022 and 2023 — the first years after Roe v. Wade was overturned — even as advocates insist those are the very years needed to see the impact of the bans.
Freeborn describes a landscape of “reproductive health deserts” and a “Black Maternal Health crisis raging across the state,” where preventable deaths mount while Black mothers are grieved “as statistics.” Walker, already a mother to a 14-year-old son, asked doctors to consider her life given her co-occurring conditions, but was told her pregnancy, not her health, determined whether she qualified for emergency care. Freeborn refuses to let Black mothers’ preventable deaths “be in vain” and calls for real investigations and governance “rooted in care” and responsive to Black birth and policy advocates.
See: “Black Mothers Are Dying. Texas Can’t Be Bothered to Investigate” (November 20, 2025)
