After it obtained seven years of Texas hospital records, website ProPublica cites patient discharge data to claim pregnancy-related sepsis cases jumped 50% after the Texas Heartbeat Act took effect in 2021.
Sepsis, a serious condition, occurs from an infection in the body in which the immune system overreacts and causes harm, especially to the organs. In a pregnancy, a miscarriage can cause sepsis if fetal tissue remains in the uterus.
The pro-life laws in red-state Texas are a frequent and favorite target of liberal news outlets, so the ProPublica story got picked by Texas Tribune, a liberal newspaper, and by CNN, among others.
Michael New, a research scholar at the Charlotte Lozier Institute, tells AFN he dug into the ProPublica story and concluded it is “cherry-picking” the hospital data for an anti-Texas story.
"ProPublica is doing a lot to try to put pro-life laws and pro-life policies in a bad light," he says.
In a related story for National Review, New rips into the data for skewed facts and omissions. Most glaringly, he says Texas averaged only 28 more sepsis cases annually in a state with 31 million people.
“There are 400,000 children born in Texas every year,” New tells AFN. “So an increase of 28 sepsis cases is not a public health crisis.”
A telling omission in the article, New found, is that pregnancy-related hospitalizations fell by 9.3.% in Texas after the heartbeat law took effect.
ProPublica published a similar article late last year that claimed Georgia's strict pro-life law led to the deaths of two women. It was later learned complications from mifepristone, the dangerous two-step abortion pill, were behind the two deaths, not the abortion law.
An article by The Federalist, written by an OB/GYN, debunked the ProPublica article line by line.
