ProPublica reports that Tierra Walker, 37, started having unexplained seizures weeks into her pregnancy.
AUSTIN, Texas — According to a report from ProPublica, a Texas mother died after doctors denied her abortion care.
The nonprofit reports that back in 2024, 37-year-old Tierra Walker started having unexplained seizures weeks into her pregnancy. Because of her history of preeclampsia – a pregnancy complication that can be life-threatening – she asked for an abortion but was told no.
A little more than two months later, ProPublica reports that Walker’s teenage son found her dead in her bedroom, on his birthday. She was 20 weeks pregnant.
This is the fourth incident ProPublica has reported on involving the death of a Texas woman following denial of abortion care. The nonprofit has previously reported on the deaths of Josseli Barnica, Nevaeh Crain and Porsha Ngumezi.
Kavitha Surana, a reporter with ProPublica who helped break Tierra Walker’s story, joined KVUE to talk more about the story.
Ashley Goudeau: How did your team learn about Tierra and what happened to her?
Surana: Well, we’ve been doing a much larger project over the past year to investigate maternal deaths in states that have banned abortions, understand how these laws are affecting women’s health care. So we’ve already uncovered three cases, actually, in Texas and two in Georgia that were related to access to reproductive care. And this involves a lot of shoe leather work, talking to people in those states, also requesting death records, speaking with families. And we learned about this case from Tierra Walker’s family. They were there with her in the hospital.
She was in and out of the hospital from the very first weeks of her pregnancy, sometimes for weeks at a time. Her family members were always with her, during her ER visits and prenatal visits. So they were able to witness the deterioration of her health and also the conversations that she had with doctors. They said that she was very concerned about her health. She had high-risk chronic conditions going into pregnancy. So she was sick and expected to get sicker. But when she tried to ask if it might get better to protect her health to end the pregnancy, they felt that she was dismissed and there was never a real counseling session.
Now, we spoke with more than 12 OBGYN experts around the country who reviewed these records for us and told us that standard practice would have been to advise a patient like this of the high-risk pregnancy early on to continue having that conversation as her condition worsened. She was having seizures, her blood pressure was never under control and she developed blood clots. To offer a termination of pregnancy at any point, if she wanted it for her health. Her health until the very end didn’t rise to the level of an urgent emergency. But it was always a precarious pregnancy.
And so, what we’ve really seen through this case is how these laws don’t leave a lot of space for – they don’t have exceptions for health risks. So the kind of conditions that Tierra entered pregnancy with, there’s not many doctors who are willing to treat that in states that ban abortion.
Goudeau: One of the things that I thought was especially interesting about this case is that she had preeclampsia before and lost twins because of that condition. This condition is extremely life-threatening and, again, the autopsy revealed that that was her cause of death, right?
Surana: That, as well as she had many other [conditions] – an enlarged heart and fluid in her heart, kidney issues that had developed that she hadn’t even been aware of. So she wasn’t even truly aware of how risky her pregnancy had become, even while she felt something inside of her that she didn’t want to risk her life and leave her 14-year-old son motherless.
Goudeau: This past legislative session, Texas lawmakers passed a bill that is supposed to let doctors use their medical judgement and not wait until a woman is on the brink of death before they perform an abortion. You reached out to lawmakers about this case – what did they tell you?
Surana: This change has went into effect after Tierra’s case and there’s still an open question of how it’s going to be implemented, how hospitals will use it, especially while there’s still criminal penalties in place that can threaten up to 99 years in prison and loss of medical license for doctors and anyone who participates.
So, ProPublica reached out to every author of the bill to ask specifically about conditions like Tierra had – uncontrolled hypertension, diabetes. I think it was very telling that none of them responded to us. You would think it would be a very clear answer if they intended that this law is going to cover chronic conditions, high-risk pregnancies. But instead, all we heard back was one Democratic lawmaker who said she didn’t think that the bill had gone far enough and she wants to see more exceptions in the future.