Family Sues Ken Paxton and Texas Medical Officials Over Woman's 2024 Death From Preeclampsia

The family of Tierra Walker filed a lawsuit Tuesday, September 15, in Bexar County District Court against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, and several treating doctors, according to CBS News. Walker died of preeclampsia in 2024 at age 37 while 20 weeks pregnant.

The lawsuit accuses Paxton and Stephen Brint Carlton, executive director of the Texas Medical Board, of imposing what it calls a "merciless blanket prohibition" on abortion that left doctors too afraid to treat her. It accuses the doctors themselves of "deliberate indifference, discrimination, and medical mistreatment," according to the complaint cited by CBS News.

"Tierra Walker is dead because not one of her healthcare providers would give her the one medical procedure that would have saved her life," Michelle Maloney, an attorney for the family, told CBS News. Maloney said the refusal stemmed from "the immense culture of fear" surrounding abortion in Texas.

These are allegations in a civil complaint. No court has ruled on them, and Paxton's office has not responded to CBS News' request for comment. University Health, in a statement to CBS News, said it cannot discuss individual patients or pending litigation but that "our priority is to provide medically appropriate and timely care, while safeguarding patient privacy and complying with all applicable laws and regulations."

What happened to Walker

Walker learned she was nearly eight weeks pregnant during an emergency room visit on September 19, 2024, according to the lawsuit. She had a documented history of obesity, high blood pressure, asthma and Type 2 diabetes.

Three years earlier she had developed preeclampsia while pregnant with twins, a pregnancy that ended in stillbirth and, the lawsuit says, sent her into a broader health decline. By mid-2024 her condition had improved: her blood pressure was down and she was losing weight with a GLP-1 drug.

An ER doctor noted in her records that it was "too early in pregnancy to have eclampsia" and sent her home after adjusting her blood pressure medication, according to the lawsuit as reported by CBS News. ProPublica first reported the underlying circumstances of Walker's death before the family filed suit.

The legal and medical fight underneath the lawsuit

Texas has one of the strictest abortion bans in the country, but the law does contain an exception allowing abortion to prevent death or "substantial impairment of a major bodily function" for the mother. Paxton has been an aggressive enforcer of the broader ban, filing lawsuits against doctors and organizations that ship abortion pills into Texas from out of state, per CBS News.

That exception is exactly what critics of the law say is the problem. Doctors and hospital groups in Texas have said publicly, in other cases and in professional forums, that the emergency exception is vague enough that physicians fear prosecution or losing their license even when a patient's condition looks life-threatening. Whether that fear, rather than the letter of the law, drove decisions in Walker's case is a central factual question the lawsuit raises.

The state's likely defense, based on Paxton's public record on this issue, will almost certainly be that the law already permits life-saving abortion care and that any failure here was a medical or hospital-level decision, not a legal mandate. Texas's ban is not, on its face, an absolute prohibition with no exception for a dying patient. Whether doctors at University Health applied that exception correctly, or were too frightened of Paxton's enforcement posture to try, is the core dispute before the court.

No depositions, discovery, or court findings have happened yet. The case adds to a small but growing number of wrongful-death and injury suits filed against Texas officials and hospitals since the state's abortion ban took effect. The lawsuits test in court what has so far been argued mostly in headlines: whether a life-of-the-mother exception that exists on paper functions in an emergency room when preeclampsia turns fatal in a matter of hours. Paxton is currently running for U.S. Senate, and how his office responds to this suit will be worth watching as the case proceeds.