In states banning abortion, doctors are denying life-saving medical care to pregnant women. Investigative journalists have revealed the names of nine women who have died after doctors denied them lifesaving care because of fears they would be criminally prosecuted under abortion bans. The deceased women’s names are: Josseli Barnica, Yeniifer Alvarez-Estrada Glick, Amber Nicole Thurman, Candi Miller, Porsha Ngumezi, Taysha Wilkinson-Sobieski, Nevaeh Crain, Tierra Walker and Ciji Graham. In one case, a fearful doctor said to a nurse, “offering a helping hand to a patient getting onto the gurney while in the throes of a miscarriage could be construed as ‘aiding and abetting an abortion.’ Best not to so much as touch the patient who is miscarrying… ”
Public health experts estimate that abortion bans have led to the deaths of at least 59 women, but we may never know their names. States with abortion bans have disbanded their maternal mortality committees so no one finds out about these deaths, then reconstituted them with anti-abortion advocates. Texas has legally prohibited its committee from reviewing deaths that are considered abortion-related.
But what states with abortion bans cannot hide is their strikingly higher maternal mortality and morbidity rates. Maternal mortality rates in Texas rose 56% in the first year the state banned abortion. Women living in states banning abortion were nearly twice as likely to die during pregnancy, childbirth or soon after giving birth compared to women living in states where abortion was legal and accessible. In states with abortion bans, pregnant women have bled to death, succumbed to fatal infections and wound up in morgues with what medical examiners recorded were “products of conception” still in their bodies.
In addition to denying life-saving care, doctors are putting women’s brain-dead bodies on ventilators to use them as incubators for embryos for long months. After harvesting severely premature babies from their decaying wombs, their corpses are disconnected from ventilators. In Georgia, when Adriana Smith was nine weeks pregnant, she died in February 2025, but doctors ventilated her corpse for four months. In June, doctors sliced open her body to harvest a severely premature, one-pound fetus. In Texas, doctors put a brain-dead woman named Marlise Munoz on a ventilator to gestate a 14-week-old fetus. Her husband and parents watched her body rot for 62 days before they finally won a lawsuit forcing doctors to detach the ventilator from Marlise’s body. Doctors have done this to the dead bodies of at least 35 women in the United States.
Doctors also have used abortion bans to force women to carry dead fetuses. In Texas, when Marlena Stell went to the hospital miscarrying a pregnancy, doctors delayed necessary medical care for two weeks because of the Texas abortion ban. “I felt like a walking coffin,” said Stell.
The harms of abortion bans have fallen most heavily on women who are carrying wanted pregnancies to term, but experience health complications and are being denied care. In a lawsuit involving denial of emergency care to pregnant women, the National Women’s Law Center filed a brief documenting more than 100 cases of women almost dying when hospitals denied emergency medical care because of abortion bans. “The true number of cases is likely significantly higher,” said the brief.
One case involved a woman named Mylissa Farmer who experienced preterm premature rupture of membranes, when the amniotic sac breaks prior to viability. Rather than treat her by terminating her pregnancy, she was denied the emergency abortion care she needed, first by her local hospital in Missouri, and then by a hospital in Kansas. Doctors at both hospitals told Mylissa her fetus could not survive and continuing her pregnancy would put her at risk of serious infection, hemorrhaging, the loss of her uterus and even death. Still, both hospitals refused to end her pregnancy because of abortion restrictions in those states. With her health deteriorating rapidly, Mylissa and her partner drove more than four hours to an Illinois abortion clinic while she was in labor.
Abortion bans harm women, causing death and trauma to pregnant women. This November, elections are critical to stopping this violence against women. Democrats must retake Congress and pass two laws: 1) the Women’s Health Protection Act, which would establish a statutory right for health care providers to offer abortion services and for patients to receive them, free from restrictions that single out abortion care, and 2) the Equal Access to Abortion Coverage in Health Insurance (EACH) Act, which would ensure that every person who receives health care or insurance through the federal government will have coverage for abortion services, and prohibit political interference with decisions by private health insurance companies to offer coverage for abortion care. These laws will decrease the appallingly high and rising maternal mortality rate in the United States — and save women’s lives, health and dignity.