Following its recent reporting on the fatal consequences of Georgia's abortion ban, ProPublica once again published shocking reports about two women dying as a result of a state abortion ban, this time in Texas. Texas’ current abortion ban restricts all abortions from conception and is among the most restrictive abortion bans in the country.

The October 30 piece by Cassandra Jaramillo and Kavitha Surana is about Josseli Barnica, who died in 2021 after she started miscarrying but was told by her doctors that ”they had to wait until there was no heartbeat. … It would be a crime to give her an abortion.” According to the article, ”For 40 hours, the anguished 28-year-old mother prayed for doctors to help her get home to her daughter; all the while, her uterus remained exposed to bacteria.” Because of significant delays to the health care she needed, Barnica died of an infection three days later. As the piece explains: 

At the time of Barnica’s miscarriage in 2021, the Supreme Court had not yet overturned the constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy. But Texas lawmakers, intent on being the first to enact a ban with teeth, had already passed a harsh civil law using a novel legal strategy that circumvented Roe v. Wade: It prohibited doctors from performing an abortion after six weeks by giving members of the public incentives to sue doctors for $10,000 judgments. The bounty also applied to anyone who ”aided and abetted” an abortion.

A year later, after the Dobbs v. Jackson ruling was handed down, an even stricter criminal law went into effect, threatening doctors with up to 99 years in prison and $100,000 in fines.

On November 1, Lizzie Presser and Kavitha Surana published another report about the 2023 death of a teenager, Nevaeh Crain, after she visited three Texas emergency rooms and was turned away the first two times. The report explained, ”Nevaeh Crain was crying in pain, too weak to walk, blood staining her thighs. Feverish and vomiting the day of her baby shower, the 18-year-old had gone to two different emergency rooms within 12 hours, returning home each time worse than before.” On her third hospital visit, ”more than two hours after her arrival, Crain’s blood pressure had plummeted and a nurse had noted that her lips were ‘blue and dusky.’ Her organs began failing. Hours later, she was dead.”

Fox News failed to report on either of these stories from October 30, when the first story was published, through noon ET, on November 4. Fox News’ failure to cover the reporting comes as no surprise -- the network has established a pattern of downplaying and ignoring the impacts of abortion bans.

CNN and MSNBC both covered the reporting, despite an eventful final week of the presidential race. MSNBC provided ample coverage, giving the reporting at least 56 minutes of airtime over at least 16 segments. CNN spent at least 11 minutes on the story.

On the October 31 edition of MSNBC's Ana Cabrera Reports, Center for Reproductive Rights President Nancy Northup plainly described the impact of state level abortion bans, saying, ”It is just a situation that is a health care crisis across the nation. Women are having to travel out of state. But if you're in this kind of an emergency situation, you can’t travel out of state. I mean, for heaven sakes, right, she [Barnica] was there in the emergency room for 40 hours before she got care, and it was too late.”

Fox News has a responsibility to inform its viewers of the real-life impacts of deadly abortion bans at the state level, made more likely by the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. Yet the network has repeatedly decided to keep their viewers in the dark, despite regular polling showing abortion as a key issue in the 2024 presidential election.

Media Matters searched transcripts in the SnapStream video database for all original programming on Fox News Channel, CNN, or MSNBC for any of the terms ”ProPublica,” ”Pro Publica,” ”Texas,” ”Crain,” ”Crane,” ”Barnica,” ”Baptist Hospitals,” ”Southeast Texas,” ”HCA Houston Healthcare Northwest,” ”HCA Houston Healthcare Northwest,” ”HCA Healthcare,” ”emergency,” ”hospital,”  or ”St. Elizabeth,” within close proximity of any of the terms ”abortion,” ”fetal,” ”heartbeat,” ”heart beat,” ”conception,” or ”sepsis,” or any variation of the terms ”reproductive” or ”pregnant” from October 30, 2024, when the first ProPublica story detailing maternal deaths in Texas resulting from the state's abortion bans was published, through noon ET on November 4, 2024. 

We timed segments, when the death of either Josseli Barnica or Nevaeh Crain or maternal mortality as a consequence of Texas' abortion laws was the stated topic of discussion or when we found significant discussion of the deaths or consequences of Texas' restrictive abortion laws. We defined significant discussion as instances when two or more speakers in a multitopic segment discussed the deaths or consequences of the laws with one another. 

We also timed mentions, which we defined as instances when a single speaker in a segment on another topic mentioned the deaths or consequences without another speaker in the segment engaging with the comment, and teasers, which we defined as instances when the anchor or host promoted a segment about the deaths or consequences scheduled to air later in the broadcast.

We rounded all times to the nearest minute.