AMNA NAWAZ: 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 Sy has more.

STEPHANIE SY: Amna, ProPublica found that the rate of sepsis jumped by more than 50 percent 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 investigation's authors and a health reporter at ProPublica.

Lizzie, thanks for joining the "News Hour."

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' abortion bans.

What exactly were you looking for in these records?

LIZZIE PRESSER, ProPublica: 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 ban was passed in 2021, it shoots up by more than 50 percent.

And when we showed these charts to experts around the country, to doctors and maternal health researchers, they saw a really clear sign in the data.

And they said that it was exactly what they had worried would happen, which is that women were experiencing significant delays in care and were contracting infections and developing sepsis at far higher rates than they used to.

STEPHANIE SY: Just to dig into the data you found a little bit deeper, you compared the rate of sepsis in women who arrived at the hospital carrying their fetus with a heartbeat or not.

Following the abortion ban, patients who were miscarrying, but still had a fetal heartbeat, contracted sepsis at a higher rate -- you see that higher line on this chart, 6.9 percent -- than those whose fetus had already died when they arrived at the hospital, 3.1 percent rate of sepsis.

Unpack how you analyze this data and how it relates back to Texas' abortion bans.

LIZZIE PRESSER: The way the law is written, if you're a doctor in the state of Texas and a patient comes into the hospital experiencing a miscarriage, those doctors often have to wait until one of two things happens.

Either the fetus no longer has a heartbeat and the doctor can document that, or their patient experiences some life-threatening condition, like sepsis, and then they can intervene.

So what you can see in this data is that, if you are a patient who walks into the hospital in Texas and you are experiencing a miscarriage, but your fetus still has a heartbeat, you're more likely to develop an infection, because your doctor is waiting for you to get extraordinarily sick before they intervene.

And that's what's so difficult to wrap your head around in this data.

Like, what this shows is a statewide trend that doctors are saying to their patients who come in with miscarriages, whom they know are at a higher risk of developing an infection, they have to say to them, we cannot help you unless you become extremely sick with a complication like sepsis.

STEPHANIE SY: The assumption is that these women were given less timely treatment and that's what led to these potentially deadly infections.

Were there any other possible explanations that you explored for the jump in cases?

LIZZIE PRESSER: There are a number of different possible explanations.

And we spoke to many maternal health researchers and doctors about them.

One is that there's been an effort across the state to identify sepsis at a much quicker rate in Texas hospitals.

That effort, however, started long before the Texas abortion ban went into play.

And so, when we looked at the sepsis rates across all hospitalized pregnant women in the state of Texas, you saw a gradual increase starting around 2018.

It is a steady rate of cases up until 2021, and then the number shoots up.

STEPHANIE SY: Lizzie, how many of these incidents have led to serious injury or even the death of a woman?

LIZZIE PRESSER: We can't investigate these cases just by the statewide discharge data alone, but, last year, we dug into the deaths of two women who died after Texas banned abortion.

And both developed sepsis after experiencing long delays in care when they were miscarrying.

Right now, the state is not investigating deaths of pregnant women, maternal mortality in the state of Texas in the years 2022 and 2023.

And so it falls to journalists to investigate what's going on with specific individuals in the state.

STEPHANIE SY: What do physicians have to say about all this?

Do they acknowledge that the law may be putting women in unnecessary danger?

And is Texas doing anything about it?

LIZZIE PRESSER: They do acknowledge that.

And, last year, more than 100 OB-GYNs wrote a letter to the legislature asking them to amend the law.

And it seems to be that there has been some openness among legislators, even Republican legislators, even the author of the first abortion ban known as the heartbeat bill in Texas, to amend the law.

It just remains to be seen if the proposed amendments this session will receive a public hearing.

STEPHANIE SY: Lizzie Presser at ProPublica, thank you so much for joining us.

LIZZIE PRESSER: Thank you for having me.