Family Sues Texas AG and Doctors Over Abortion Ban

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Kusha Navadar (1:11)

It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. I'm Kusha Navadar, filling in for Brian today.

Coming up on today's show, Greg David, who covers jobs in the economy for The City Reporter, will explain what AI is doing to the New York City economy. Turns out it is having an effect on tech jobs here, though so far it's mostly entry-level workers being displaced. Plus, surveillance. We've had a lot of conversations on this show about this over the years, including recently on the uproar over flock cameras. People tend to say they are not comfortable with the level of surveillance in their lives, especially from the government. But then, ring cameras are everywhere, and people think nothing of taking a picture or video of someone in public and posting it to social media. So we'll get into the contradictions and how it seems like we're all grappling with so much surveillance in our lives. And we'll wrap today's show with a conversation about storage units.

So many New Yorkers feel they need a unit to deal with our tiny apartments and lack of closets, but even other parts of the country with plenty of space, the storage unit business is booming. Why can't we just let go of our stuff? Is this uniquely American? More on that near the end of today's show with the New Yorker writer David Owen who looked into this.

But first, we begin today's show in Texas where Attorney General Ken Paxton, who's now running for US Senate, was sued this week by the family of a woman who died after she couldn't get an abortion.

Tierra Walker died in December of 2024, 20 weeks into her pregnancy, in a state with a near total abortion ban. On Tuesday, her family sued the hospital and doctors who treated her along with Paxton, who has taken a leading role in enforcing that ban. The 19th reports it's the first lawsuit over a death linked to an abortion ban. It comes as new reporting shows what these bands are doing to pregnancy care more broadly. A ProPublica analysis published last week found the number of women dying after an ectopic pregnancy has nearly doubled in this country, with the steepest rise in states that ban abortion. Meanwhile, abortion is on the ballot this November in four states. It's Idaho, Missouri, Nevada and Virginia. And we'll get into those two towards the end of the segment. Joining us now to discuss the lawsuit, the Senate race, and what these bans are doing to pregnancy care is Shefali Luthra, reproductive health reporter at The 19th. Shefali, welcome to WNYC.

Shefali Luthra (3:48)

Thank you so much for having me.

Kusha Navadar (3:50)

So can you start us off by, I think, just introducing us to Tiara Walker? Who was she? How did she die?

Shefali Luthra (3:57)

Right. So this is, I mean, this is a really, really heart wrenching case that was unearthed by ProPublica. Tiara Walker lived in Texas. She was a mother, she was a wife, a caregiver, a niece, all of these. Different personas, identities and her family really described her as the glue who held her family together. She discovered when she was receiving emergency medical care that she was pregnant. This was clearly not a planned pregnancy and it very quickly became medically very complicated. She had a lot of chronic health conditions that made her pregnancy much more dangerous. Diabetes, hypertension, severe asthma, obesity.

She was repeatedly hospitalized over her pregnancy. According to her lawsuit and her family, she kept asking for an abortion and doctors wouldn't give her one and wouldn't tell her how to get one. Instead telling her that, in their words, the baby is fine.

Then days after one of her discharges from the hospital in San Antonio, she died of preeclampsia and her family has sued because their argument is that if she had gotten an abortion, she would have lived and this is what the doctors who reviewed ProPublica's investigation also found that an abortion probably could have saved her life because being pregnant really complicated all of these medical conditions she already had. As you mentioned, this case is really, really significant because there have been a lot of lawsuits over abortion bans. There have been a lot of women whose debts have been linked to abortion bans, but we haven't seen a case quite like this, a case that is suing people like Attorney General Ken Paxton, a case filed because of someone's death, and a case that is arguing that Texas's abortion ban is unconstitutional because the lawyers say it violates the right to life that is guaranteed by the federal constitution and by Texas's constitution.