In the years since the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to an abortion in

2022, and since Texas instituted one of the country's strictest abortion bans, the state has

seen an increased rate of sepsis among women who lost their pregnancies in the second trimester.

That is according to a new investigation by ProPublica. Stephanie Sye has more.

Omna, ProPublica found that the rate of sepsis jumped by more than 50% in the two years since

the Texas abortion ban went into effect. Sepsis is a life-threatening condition caused by the body's

extreme reaction to an infection.

In 2021, there were 67 patients in Texas who were diagnosed with sepsis after losing a pregnancy in their second trimester.

That number rose to 90 in 2022, and in 2023, it grew to 99.

Texas is one of 12 states in the country with a near total ban on abortion.

To discuss all this, I'm joined by Lizzie Presser, one of the investigations authors and a health

reporter at ProPublica.

Lizzie, thanks for joining the NewsHour.

So your reporting team arrived at these statistics by looking at hospital

discharge records of pregnant women who had experienced a second trimester miscarriage in the years

before and after Texas's abortion bans. What exactly were you looking for in these records?

We wanted to understand if there were statewide trends in the complications that women were

experiencing when they showed up to the hospital with a miscarriage.

And when we looked at the data and we broke it out by different complications,

sepsis was the one that we saw changed dramatically.

And you can see in the charts that before the first abortion ban went into

effect, the rate of sepsis for this patient population was remarkably steady. After the first

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