Georgia Doesn’t Want the Public to Know Who’s on Its New Maternal Mortality Committee

The state dismissed the entire committee last year and this alarming lack of transparency means there's no way to tell if anti-abortion doctors are reviewing patient deaths.

By Susan Rinkunas | March 10, 2025 | 4:47pm

Photo: Getty Images Abortion Politics

Georgia Doesn’t Want the Public to Know Who’s on Its New Maternal Mortality Committee

In the fall, the investigative outlet ProPublica reported that at least two Georgia women had died preventable deaths thanks to the state’s six-week abortion ban. The Georgia Department of Public Health responded by dismissing every member of the 32-person committee dedicated to reviewing pregnancy-related deaths because, it claimed, that members violated confidentiality agreements by anonymously sharing internal reports with ProPublica. Now, the state has relaunched its maternal mortality review committee (MMRC)—but it won’t disclose the identities of the new hires. This means there’s currently no way to tell if anti-abortion doctors are reviewing patient deaths and making recommendations to improve care.

DPH said the reconstituted committee met for the first time on February 21, but the agency denied ProPublica’s open records request for the names of the committee members, even though it had provided the names of previous members in August. The work of the MMRC is confidential under state law and some of its records and reports are excluded from public records laws, meaning reporters can’t access them. The law doesn’t say that committee members’ identities are confidential, but DPH spokesperson Nancy Nydam said the department’s review of the statute “determined that the broad confidentiality protections directed toward the committee should be extended to the identities of the committee members.”

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This is an alarming lack of transparency, as other states have kicked out members critical of state actions and appointed anti-abortion advocates instead.

In May of last year, Texas appointed to the state’s maternal review committee Dr. Ingrid Skop, who testified before Congress that she believes child rape survivors as young as nine or 10 years old can safely carry a pregnancy to term. Skop has also said the link between abortion restrictions and risks to maternal mortality is “fallacious.” Texas also declined to reappoint community advocate Nakeenya Wilson after she criticized Texas for delaying the release of data in 2022, an election year. Then in November, the Texas MMRC said it would skip mortality data from 2022 and 2023—the period after its abortion bans first took effect—because the group was behind on its work, or so they said. Texas isn’t the only bad actor: Idaho lawmakers disbanded the state’s committee in 2023 following conservative backlash to a recommendation to expand Medicaid for postpartum women, and only revived it the following year.

States know that their abortion bans are killing people and causing many more to experience complications from needless delays in accessing routine care like D&Cs. These delays can also impact their future fertility and women sued both Texas and Idaho for this very reason. But instead of trying to make pregnancy safer for women and pregnant people, some states are trying to simply hide the truth about what’s going on and double down on their harmful policies.

Georgia harmed the public’s trust by dismissing its committee following ProPublica’s reporting, which Gov. Brian Kemp (R) called “egregious misinformation and propaganda.” If the state wants people to trust its review of maternal deaths, it should be far more transparent than this.