With a power shift imminent at the Texas Capitol, advocates are more hopeful than ever that incoming elected officials will finally empower the state's beleaguered maternal mortality committee to review abortion-related deaths.

State law and decisions by the Legislature in recent years have hamstrung the Texas Maternal Mortality and Morbidity Review Committee's work by restricting the data it is allowed to review and stopping the committee from sharing its detailed maternal death data with the federal government.

"It was a review committee - it felt like - in name only," said state Rep. Lauren Ashley Simmons, a Houston Democrat who sits on the House Public Health Committee.