The family of Tierra Walker sued Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton this week, alleging that Texas’ abortion ban blocked care that would have saved her.
Medical facts already on the record, and an obstetrician who reviewed the case, point to a different cause: untreated preeclampsia and a decision to send a high-risk patient home, not a law that bans abortion.
Walker, a 37-year-old dental assistant and mother of three from San Antonio, died December 28, 2024, at about 20 weeks of pregnancy.
An autopsy found hypertensive cardiovascular disease: her heart enlarged and failed, with kidney damage and fluid buildup. She had chronic hypertension, diabetes and obesity, a history of stillbirth from severe preeclampsia, seizures, and a life-threatening blood clot that required emergency surgery.
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The lawsuit, filed Tuesday in Bexar County, also names the executive director of the Texas Medical Board, the University of Texas health system and individual doctors. It alleges Walker and relatives asked for an abortion as she faced seizures and blood clots, that doctors refused to treat her, and that the state’s ban is unconstitutional.
But killing her baby would not have solved any of the underlying medical problems.
And Texas law already allowed intervention. The ban includes an abortion exception when a physician, using reasonable medical judgment, finds a life-threatening physical condition caused or aggravated by pregnancy that places the woman at risk of death or serious impairment of a major bodily function. The risk of death does not have to be imminent.
So even if the circumstance somehow required an abortion to end the life of her baby, the Texas abortion ban in no way prevents doctors from doing one to save a woman’s life.
The state also updated the abortion ban to ensure that any such ultra-rare life-saving abortion is fully legally allowed if necessary.
In May 2025 the Legislature passed the bipartisan Life of the Mother Act, shifting the burden of proof to the state in any prosecution and requiring obstetricians to take continuing education on the law.
Doctors generally say the life-saving treatment once Walker’s preeclampsia became severe and uncontrollable at 20 weeks was induction of labor. That care is permitted under the statute.
Dr. Christina Francis of the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists reviewed the reported course of care and said Walker’s death reflected failures of basic medicine and coordination, not the abortion statute.
Walker was a high-risk patient from the start and should have had coordinated maternal-fetal medicine care, Francis said. At about 20 weeks she was diagnosed with preeclampsia, given blood-pressure medication and discharged. Francis called that “frankly malpractice.”
Previable preeclampsia is severe preeclampsia and requires hospitalization, she said.
Ultimately, Walker was sent home when she needed hospital care, and Texas law already allowed the delivery of her baby and other proper care that treats severe preeclampsia.
Doctors could have kept her on a continuous blood-pressure drip until she was stable.
“This behavior is not explained by people being afraid of abortion laws,” Francis said. Fear of the statute, she said, would not explain failing to control her blood pressure early in pregnancy or after the preeclampsia diagnosis.
Francis said physicians facing chronic, high-risk conditions should first use evidence-based treatment and coordinated maternal-fetal care. On the facts reported, she said the failure was basic obstetrics: keep a preeclamptic patient in the hospital, control her blood pressure and deliver if she cannot be stabilized.
Walker’s death was a tragedy. The claim that only a banned abortion could have saved her does not match Texas statute or the standard treatment for the disease that killed her.
