The state’s delay of a highly-anticipated report of maternal deaths until after the election is going to prevent lifesaving recommendations from going into effect and lawmakers from getting a head start on writing legislation, women’s health advocates said Friday.

“State leadership would rather sweep the Maternal Mortality and Morbidity Review Committee’s biannual report under the rug than be held accountable for the impact their policies have had on the lives of Texas moms,” said state Rep. Donna Howard, D-Austin, at a rally outside the Texas Department of State Health Services headquarters.

The maternal mortality committee’s report, which is released every two years, was to be released by Sept. 1. Instead, it’s been delayed until December, which the state is permitting because of a state law that passed in 2025 that gave more leeway for report submissions to the governor. It gives agencies until December to submit any health and safety-related report. The maternal mortality report, which contains findings and recommendations to reduce maternal deaths, includes, for the first time, data on deaths of women that have occurred after Texas banned abortion in 2021.

The state health department has said the report is merely proceeding through the regular internal review. “As part of that process, the acting commissioner has asked the committee to strengthen the report by further describing its work around preventability, better defining the sources of its recommendations, and making clearer connections between the underlying data, findings, and recommendations,” the department said in an earlier statement.

Still, it marks the second time since the committee was created in 2013, that its review of maternal deaths has not been released until after a midterm election. The last time was in 2022 when it was released after that year’s elections.

Howard and other women’s health organizations pointed out the delay — ahead of the election and the upcoming state legislative session — impacts Texans in three ways.

It keeps pregnant Texans unaware of possible risks that resulted in state deaths in prior years.

The delay this year also gives state lawmakers less time to generate bills based on the report’s recommendations. Bill prefiling for next year’s session begins on Nov. 9.

Thirdly, the delay also means voters concerned about maternal mortality can’t use the information from the report to consider their political candidate choices on Nov. 3. Reproductive rights have not been a major pillar of candidates’ campaigns this election cycle since the state’s initial ban on abortion in 2021 and the overturning of Roe v. Wade the following year.

“All of this amounts to a systemic and politically-motivated cover up,” said Raven E. Freeborn, a doula and the CEO of the pro-abortion group, Avow Texas. “We cannot allow hidden agendas to be the reasons Texans don’t survive their pregnancies.”

As speakers took turns to urge the report’s immediate release, photos of several women who have died from pregnancy complications, were displayed in front of a podium outside DSHS offices.

One photo was of Tierra Walker whose family this month filed a lawsuit against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and the Texas Medical Board. Their suit blames the state’s abortion ban which they say prevented doctors from terminating her pregnancy as she suffered from serious pregnancy complications, including preeclampsia, that resulted in her 2024 death.

A year ago, the news organization ProPublica reported that pregnancy in Texas has become more dangerous following the abortion ban, with the rate of sepsis rose by 50% among Texas women hospitalized after losing their pregnancies in the second trimester. This month, ProPublica reported that there’s been a rise in deaths among women who experienced ectopic pregnancies, where a pregnancy implants outside of the uterus, usually in the fallopian tubes. That rise is worse in abortion-ban states like Texas.

State Rep. Vikki Goodwin, the Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor, was the only statewide political candidate who attended the rally outside the DSHS office, where inside the maternal mortality committee was meeting in executive session, which is closed to the public.

“Women are leaving this state because they don’t feel safe being pregnant in Texas,” Goodwin said. “This is incredibly unfortunate and unacceptable.”

The last report reviewed cases from 2019 and 2020. The committee decided to skip 2022 and 2023 to focus on cases from 2021 and 2024 because members said they wanted to look at more recent cases.

Since as far back as 2024, the maternal mortality committee’s minutes have shown that it has been reviewing 2021 deaths and have repeatedly acknowledged they had a Sept. 1, 2026 deadline to publish their findings. At their December 2025 meeting, the committee reports that DSHS identified 277 death cases associated with pregnancy in 2021 and 180 cases for the first three quarters of 2024. The 2021 deaths are higher than the two years prior. More context is needed to draw conclusions about the data, including how many of them died because of COVID-19 and other causes and how many pregnant women there were that year.

At that same meeting nearly a year ago, the committee’s minutes indicated that their review of all the 2021 deaths would be completed that day and that the 2024 would be finished by May of 2026.

On Thursday, Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett chided Texas Gov. Greg Abbott in a letter she sent this week to him and Texas health commissioner Imelda Garcia about the report’s delay.

“The Abbott administration has failed Texas mothers. Under this administration’s leadership, Texas is one of the lowest-performing states for overall maternal health,” she wrote. “Concealing the official data that demonstrates your failures until after the election denies Texans the opportunity to examine updated data on your failures less than 30 days before early voting is set to begin on October 19, 2026.”