When Florida lawmakers return to Tallahassee next week for a special legislative session, they’ll be greeted by billboards calling for transparency around Florida’s maternal mortality rates – a public messaging campaign that comes in direct response to The Florida Trib’s recent reporting on how a state committee responsible for investigating deaths during pregnancy went dark after lawmakers restricted access to abortion. 

The pair of billboards, located on the north and south stretch of a main thoroughfare leading to the capitol building, are emblazoned with the message, “Release the data. Abortion bans kill.”

The campaign was launched by Mayday Health, a reproductive health education nonprofit that uses digital advertising and guerilla marketing campaigns to educate patients across the country on how to access abortion pills, contraception and gender-affirming care. 

Asked what inspired the Tallahassee campaign, Mayday Health executive director Leo Raisner told The Trib, “I just read your reporting.”

“At Mayday, we were pretty outraged,” Raisner said. “So we decided to put up billboards in Tallahassee where the Florida Department of Health is headquartered to pressure the department to release its maternal mortality data.”

The Florida Department of Health did not respond to a request for comment about the billboards.

Last month, The Trib revealed how FDOH had for years failed to release the findings of its Maternal Mortality Review Committee, which, like similar panels in all 50 states, is responsible for investigating any death that occurs while a woman is pregnant or up to a year postpartum, and issuing public recommendations on how to avoid what are overwhelmingly preventable deaths. 

After a reporter for The Trib started asking questions about the secretive committee’s delayed work product, FDOH quietly uploaded three new annual reports to its website for deaths that occurred in 2021, 2022 and 2023, though the analyses and recommendations were significantly narrower than in previous years. 

Up until then, the last report the committee had issued was for deaths that occurred in 2020 – meaning there had been no publicly released findings on the ongoing impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021 – when maternal deaths spiked nationwide – and no analysis of the impacts of Florida’s 15-week abortion ban implemented in 2022 or the six-week ban that went into effect in 2024.

Even with the recently published reports, there has still been no publicly-released findings for deaths that occurred in 2024, which could assess any impacts of the state’s near-total abortion ban.

The years-long blackout also covered a time during which critics have accused Gov. Ron DeSantis and his surgeon general who oversees FDOH, Joseph Ladapo, of politicizing public health.

For decades, public health experts have relied on maternal health outcomes as a sentinel indicator of the nation’s health – a metric that can illuminate persistent demographic disparities and systemic failures in access to care. 

Researchers have found that abortion restrictions are associated with worse maternal health outcomes, in part because data shows that continuing a pregnancy carries a greater risk of death than having an abortion.

Asked whether Florida’s Maternal Mortality Review Committee is analyzing the impact of the state’s near-total abortion ban, FDOH spokesperson Brian Wright said it’s not the panel’s responsibility to find out. 

“Policy implications are not in the purview of this committee,” Wright said.

The state has refused to release the names of the Maternal Mortality Review Committee’s members, which are readily published in other states. Florida law generally requires deliberative bodies to operate in public, but this panel operates almost entirely behind closed doors.

Its meetings are not noticed, and there are no published agendas or meeting minutes. It’s also not clear who appoints the members, how long they serve or whether they are required to possess a medical degree or other relevant credentials. 

“Information regarding the specific membership and governance of the MMRC is not made public,” Wright said. “This is to protect the integrity of the review process, which involves the discussion of sensitive and confidential health information.”

FDOH has not provided The Trib with a legal justification that would allow the committee to be exempt from Florida’s open government laws. Unlike some other states’ maternal health committees, Florida’s panel is not codified in state law. The Trib last month filed a public records request seeking the committee’s roster, but the department has not yet provided the records.  

In the meantime, public health experts and reproductive rights advocates maintain that timely, transparent, comprehensive maternal mortality data is essential to effectively educate patients and providers – and to avoid more preventable deaths.  

“In order to understand how we can better prevent deaths, we need to have information about those deaths,” said Melanie-Angela Neuilly, a professor at Washington State University who has researched maternal mortality review committees across the country.

“In the case of maternal mortality, not having that information straightforwardly available will have a kind of snowball effect on the safety of pregnant people in Florida overall,” she added.

Kate Payne is The Florida Trib’s state government reporter. She can be reached at kate.payne@floridatrib.org.