Editorial: Florida harms women, then keeps it secret

Sun Sentinel Editorial Board, South Florida Sun Sentinel on May 8, 2026

Published in Op Eds

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Pregnancies can kill.

But Florida’s Maternal Mortality Review Committee would rather not talk about it.

The state Department of Health committee gathers and analyzes data on mothers who lose their lives to pregnancy. Understanding life-threatening pregnancies is the baseline for finding ways to treat them.

For five years, state health officials have quietly black-boxed the crucial data.

The DOH only recently published information for three of those years — 2021, 2022 and 2023 — and only after a reporter with the Florida Tributary news site pressed the agency to explain why they were missing.

They are also dramatically scaled back. The 2019 report, for instance, was a detailed 31 pages. The 2023 report runs 16 pages and is mostly charts.

It’s not clear whether the data for 2024 and 2025 exist.

For women, years of despair

During those five years, Gov. Ron DeSantis, the Florida Legislature and Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo repeatedly took steps that put pregnant women at risk.

In 2023, Florida illegally ended Medicaid coverage for almost 500,000 recipients, primarily pregnant and postpartum women, infants and children. That year, death ratios for Black pregnant women skyrocketed.

Last year, Ladapo and DeSantis crowed about becoming the first state to recommend against COVID-19 vaccinations, even though pregnant women with COVID are more likely to develop severe infections, more likely to wind up on a ventilator and more likely to die.

It gets worse. Florida rushed a 15-week abortion ban into law in 2022, just 90 days after Roe v. Wade was overturned. In 2024, DeSantis signed a draconian six-week abortion ban.

Pregnancies are more dangerous than abortions. But abortion bans are dangerous, too. After Texas effectively banned abortion, the news site ProPublica found a sharp increase in deadly infections.

Hiding the bad news

The story here is not very complicated. Politicians and government officials who create bad policy do not want bad outcomes to be public where everyone can see them.

They don’t want to discuss Anya Cook of Margate, who lost half her blood after a miscarriage at home. She was sent home with a dangerous complication by ER doctors, citing Florida’s abortion ban.

They don’t want to dwell on Deborah Dorbert of Lakeland, who in 2023 was forced to risk her health by the same ban, required to carry a fetus with no kidneys who was born gasping for breath.

The newly released 2023 data suggests that Florida’s overall pregnancy death ratio of 18.5 per 100,000 live births is consistent with national outcomes. However, that’s an 18% increase from the 2022 ratio of 15.6. The mortality ratio for pregnant Black women more than doubled between 2022 and 2023 — and 83% of all deaths were preventable.

The data for 2024 and 2025, years when the six-week abortion was in effect, might be worse. It also could be better. The state’s inexplicable obsession with secrecy means no one knows.

The secrets are everywhere

The secrecy extends beyond pregnancy outcomes.

The state has not made public the names of the members of the Maternal Mortality Review Committees, the Florida Tributary reported, and there are no published agendas or meeting minutes.

A Department of Health spokesman said keeping that information from the public “protects the integrity” of the work, which involves sensitive health information.

That’s absurd.

Florida’s Board of Medicine reviews sensitive medical material involving practitioner complaints and their members’ names are public. The CDC publishes death data without running afoul of privacy rules.

A too-familiar pattern

But withholding and even manipulating data is a DOH pattern.

It quietly changed how COVID-19 infections were calculated in 2021, using a method that made cases appear to be declining. It stopped publishing full COVID tracking data and unsuccessfully fought its release in a two-year court battle.

It is now back in court, defending its decision to charge the AIDS Healthcare Foundation $786,507 for public records.

When lawmakers return to Tallahassee next week to craft a state budget, they will be greeted by billboards near the state Capitol reading “Release the data. Abortion bans kill.”

The messages, by a reproductive health education nonprofit, Mayday Health, were inspired by The Florida Tributary’s reporting.

It might not budge legislators to demand that DOH does its job by producing pregnancy information.

But at least the state’s unwillingness to provide is no longer a secret.

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The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Opinion Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Opinion Editor Dan Sweeney, editorial writers Pat Beall and Martin Dyckman, and Executive Editor Gretchen Day-Bryant. To contact us, email at letters@sun-sentinel.com.

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