The Texas Medical Board has disciplined three doctors it says mishandled pregnancy-related emergencies, after patients died following delayed or inappropriate care under the state’s strict abortion ban.
Board orders discipline in two Texas cases
In 2024, Misryoum newsroom reported on the case of 18-year-old Nevaeh Crain, who began experiencing severe pregnancy complications when she was six months pregnant in 2023.
Misryoum editorial team stated that she showed clear signs of an infection, but doctors at two hospitals sent her home.
On her third visit, as her condition deteriorated, a doctor did not send her to the intensive care unit until he could confirm fetal demise with two ultrasounds.
Texas law requires doctors to create extra documentation before performing procedures that could end a pregnancy, according to Misryoum reporting.
By the time the doctor logged that there was no fetal heartbeat, the medical record shows Crain was too unstable for surgery.
She died with her fetus still in her womb.
The board cited Dr.
Ali Mohamed Osman, an emergency medicine doctor who saw Crain at Baptist Hospitals of Southeast Texas during her first emergency room visit, for failing to appropriately treat her infection or check the health of the fetus.
Osman, Misryoum newsroom reported, sent her home with a prescription for antibiotics for strep throat without investigating her stomach cramps.
Dr.
William Noel Hawkins, an OB-GYN who saw Crain at Christus Southeast Texas St.
Elizabeth hospital during her second ER visit hours later, was cited for discharging Crain even though she had a 103-degree fever, screened positive for sepsis and had a fetus with an abnormally high heart rate.
For both Osman and Hawkins, the board wrote that “this delay in care ultimately resulted in the death of both the patient and her unborn child due to complications of pregnancy.” A board spokesperson would not say whether it investigated Dr.
Marcelo Totorica, who saw Crain at her third visit to an ER and required two fetal ultrasounds, 90 minutes apart, before wheeling Crain into the ICU for an operation.
Misryoum editorial desk noted that the board does not disclose open investigations or cases when a doctor has been cleared of wrongdoing.
Totorica did not respond to a request for comment.
Delayed care, disputed decisions and training orders
The board cited Davis for failing to quantify the volume of blood loss and for choosing to monitor Ngumezi’s condition instead of immediately taking her for a D&C procedure.
It added that it could not determine if Ngumezi would have survived if she received an emergency D&C.
One small, real-world detail that sticks with people who have read the case files: in courthouse hallways and waiting rooms, the air can turn stale fast when a family has been waiting on answers.
Here, the waiting seemed to last until after the deaths—then, months later, the board’s orders arrived.
The board has the power to levy fines up to $5,000 and, in the most extreme cases, suspend or revoke doctors’ licenses.
In these cases, each doctor was ordered to take eight hours of continuing education courses within a year.
While under the terms of the order, all must notify any employers of the board’s findings against them.
Davis and Hawkins were disciplined in October, and Osman was disciplined in March.
None of the doctors or hospitals responded to requests for comment, and in the medical board orders, the doctors neither admit nor deny the board’s findings and agree to comply with the discipline.
Hope Ngumezi, Porsha Ngumezi’s husband, said the board’s order felt like “a slap in the face.” “What kind of justice is this for Porsha?” he said.
“I feel like the doctor shouldn’t be practicing anymore.” Hawkins, who failed to meet the standard of care in Crain’s case, according to the board, had previously been disciplined for improper care in several other cases, including failing to provide a tubal ligation and failing to diagnose a syphilis infection.
The board issued an order to have Hawkins’ medical practice monitored in 2015; it was lifted two years later.
Reproductive rights advocates welcomed the Texas board’s recent actions, but said it and other states’ medical boards should do more—especially publicly.
None of the Texas discipline orders, for example, directly sanction a doctor for failing to offer or provide an abortion for a high-risk medical condition.
The board also would not say whether it has opened investigations into doctors involved in other cases or any others where pregnant patients may have received substandard care due to abortion restrictions.
And that, honestly, leaves a lot hanging—whether more sanctions are coming, and how loudly the board will say what it’s willing to enforce, even as the law keeps squeezing what doctors can document and when they can act.
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