Tierra Walker, 37, died of preeclampsia when she was 20 weeks pregnant. Her family filed a lawsuit against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and other doctors, alleging that the state's abortion ban led to her death. CBS News' Jericka Duncan reports.
Page H2From§Eachthe matinee edition — 16 September 2026
Texas sued over a preeclampsia death under its abortion ban, filed as ectopic pregnancy deaths nearly double
As it ran on the front
My nephew Anthony started law school in August, and already he talks like this is the tenth lawsuit he's read this semester, not the first. He called Sunday to tell me about a new one — a family suing Ken Paxton over a woman named Tierra Walker, who was thirty-seven, twenty weeks along, and died of preeclampsia. The lawsuit says the state's abortion ban is why. Anthony reads it to me over the phone like it's Torts 101: does the law's own text create a duty to act, or does it create a reason not to?
I wrote none of this down myself — Anthony did, on his laptop, in a file he had to hunt for twice before he found it — but there's a number in that file I keep coming back to. Nearly doubled. That's what a report says happened to ectopic pregnancy deaths in states with bans like Paxton's. Not up a little. Nearly doubled.…
…(cont) I'm sorry, I keep going back to that number, but look at the date on it. September 9th. One week — Anthony checked it twice — before the Walker family filed on the 16th. Not a decade of data catching up. Seven days.
He asked me something I could actually check for once: who publishes a number like that? Reporters did. ProPublica, the file said. Not a state agency. Not Paxton's office. A newsroom got there first.
I'm sorry, I keep going back to this, but it's the size of it that gets me. Nearly doubled isn't a typo you catch and fix by Tuesday. It's not a fan belt — I've had the Buick's fan belt swapped twice this year alone, and each time the guy just orders the part, puts it on, done. A number like nearly doubled isn't a part you order. Somebody has to carry it — the whole report, however many pages — from one desk to another, past people whose job it is to read it before it becomes a headline.
I'm sorry, I keep going back to this, but I keep thinking about who had to carry it. Anthony printed the ProPublica piece for me because I don't trust myself with a laptop, and it took both of us on the porch, two hands each, to keep the pages from blowing off in the wind — a dozen pages, maybe more, for one number. Nearly doubled.
The dog wanted out around then, so we stood on the porch a while, Anthony still talking, me not writing anything down because I didn't have to — Anthony had it typed. I'm sorry, one more time, because this is the last time I bring up the number on its own — nearly doubled sits in the same file as a woman the lawsuit says the same ban helped kill.
Anthony started down the steps, briefcase, no coat, and I didn't stop him — and then he turned back around and said, oh, wait, sorry, one more thing before I forget to tell you. A federal judge in Texas put a lawsuit over the abortion pill on hold, end of August. Not dismissed. Delayed. Until after the midterms.
Whose request was that, the one that moved a ruling on a medication past an election? The Department of Justice's, Anthony said, reading it off his phone this time, no laptop. I stood on the porch with the dog after he drove off, thinking about a report somebody carried down a hallway before anyone with Paxton's name on a lawsuit got around to reading it — a number that had, by then, nearly doubled.
“They write a law promising to save pregnant women, then they're the ones named in a wrongful death suit because a woman bled out from a complication the ban made doctors afraid to touch. The data backs it up — ectopic pregnancy deaths nearly doubled in state after state that passed bans like this one, same pattern, not a fluke. That's not one bad outcome, that's what happens when you make a doctor choose between a patient and a prosecutor.”
“Look, correlation isn't causation, and if doctors are too scared to treat an ectopic pregnancy that's a training gap, not a law problem — the ban has a medical emergency exception, it's right there in the text, very clear. Did I say clear? There's ongoing litigation over what counts as an emergency under that exception, but that's — that's not the point I'm making right now. The point is General Paxton is defending the statute as written, and if the mortality numbers look bad that's a data-reporting issue for someone else to sort out.”
The receipts
The post Ectopic Pregnancy Deaths Have Nearly Doubled. It’s Worse in States With Abortion Bans. appeared first on ProPublica .
“Tierra Walker is dead and those responsible must be held accountable,” the lawsuit reads.
· Court Lets US Abortion Pill Access Continue—Until Trump FDA Finishes Review Condemned as 'Sham' from the morgue, 31 Aug 2026
· Federal judge delays a mifepristone lawsuit until after midterms from the morgue, 31 Aug 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.