The family of a San Antonio woman who died in December 2024 after a pregnancy marked by severe complications has filed a wrongful death lawsuit accusing Texas officials and medical professionals of “deliberate indifference, discrimination, and medical mistreatment” that led to her “horrific and tragic death.”
Tierra Walker, 37, learned she was pregnant in September 2024. According to family court filings, she already carried a long list of chronic conditions, including obesity, uncontrolled hypertension, severe asthma requiring past intubation, a seizure disorder called PNES, Type 2 diabetes with hyperglycemia, gastroparesis, hyperlipidemia and complicated prior pregnancies. Court documents indicate Walker was aware of her pregnancy and already experiencing complications by five weeks gestation.
In the months before her death, Walker was repeatedly hospitalized with seizures, nausea, vomiting and pain associated with high blood pressure. Doctors reportedly told her she faced a “high risk of death,” but the family says physicians declined to perform an abortion because they did not believe the pregnancy was the underlying cause of her deterioration. An autopsy included in the filings found Walker died on December 30, 2024, days after being discharged from the hospital with a preeclampsia diagnosis, as a result of “hypertensive cardiovascular disease with superimposed preeclampsia.”
The lawsuit names Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and Texas Medical Board Executive Director Stephen Brint Carlton as defendants, alleging they “imposed a merciless blanket prohibition on abortion that intimidates doctors into inaction and breeds extreme fear among Texas’s medical establishment.” The filing also argues, several pages in, that the state’s abortion limit is “unconstitutional.” The petition was filed close to the expiration of Texas’s statute of limitations for wrongful death claims, nearly two years after Walker’s death and about a year after ProPublica reported on the case.
A pro-life physician’s response
Dr. Christina Francis, CEO of the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists, told The Federalist that pinning Walker’s death on Texas’s abortion law is “not only misplaced, but really has no basis in reality.”
“My concern with this lawsuit focusing on the Texas abortion law is that we’re actually really missing the underlying root causes of what led to you know not only Tierra’s health being in such poor condition at the beginning of her pregnancy, but also the the possibility of having prevented her death.”
Francis said she had not reviewed Walker’s medical records directly, but based on the court filings, she identified “multiple instances where, at least from the available information, it appears that her care was just not handled appropriately.” She noted preeclampsia is rarely seen before 20 weeks gestation, and that repeated hospital discharges in Walker’s case “is not consistent with any kind of medical standard whatsoever.”
Francis said she saw no indication in the court filing that any doctor told the family they wanted to end the pregnancy but were legally barred from doing so. She said that even if that had occurred, it would not reflect an accurate reading of Texas law.
“[Walker] very clearly, especially once she had the diagnosis of preeclampsia at 20 weeks, very definitely would have qualified to have an early delivery under Texas law.”
What the law actually says
Texas’s 2021 heartbeat law includes an exception allowing abortion when a doctor believes a medical emergency necessitates it and the woman’s condition prevents compliance with the statute. In 2025, the state enacted the Life of the Mother Act, which reaffirms that abortion is permitted when a pregnant woman’s life is at risk of death or serious injury if the pregnancy continues. That law was designed to give doctors “additional clarity around Texas’s pro-life laws.”
Francis pointed to the Texas Supreme Court’s ruling in the Amanda Zurawski case, which she said established that doctors can intervene even when a woman is not immediately facing death but has a pregnancy complication that could lead to one — a decision she said received wide publicity in Texas.
“Four and a half years out from the Dobbs decision, I don’t know that there is any justification for any physician to to claim that they don’t understand their their state’s law… It certainly is inherent upon them to to understand their law.”
Political timing
The lawsuit arrives roughly two months before November’s midterm elections, in which Paxton is a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate. Several media outlets covering the case featured Paxton prominently in headlines and images; CBS’s coverage closed with a quote from Walker’s mother telling Paxton to “go to hell.”
Francis said Paxton’s inclusion as a defendant makes the case easy political material, but urged people to focus on the underlying medical circumstances rather than the political fight.
“The fact that that Ken Paxton is named in the lawsuit makes it easy for political fodder. But I would certainly hope that people would not get distracted by the political fight that’s going on right now, and rather look at what really was the root cause of Tierra’s death. It was not the Texas law. It was, I think, really a lack of attention to how sick she was, and and managing that appropriately.”
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