States Passing Abortion Bans Have Highest Infant Mortality Rates

June 25, 2022 Stan

Many states with restrictive bans on abortion rank in the top 10 states for maternal mortality, infant mortality, or both.
Although research hasn’t definitively concluded that the spike in the US’ maternal mortality is due to a lack of abortion access.
However, experts say being denied abortions contributes to poverty and worse economic outcomes.

With Friday’s Supreme court ruling overturning Roe v. Wade – the landmark case guaranteeing a right to abortion – 13 states with automatic trigger laws enacted total or near-total bans on abortions.

The surge of new abortion bans and clinic closures has highlighted the recent rise in America’s maternal mortality rates that are disproportionately affecting women of color and have placed the US first in maternal deaths among all developed nations.

Twenty-two states have made it illegal or inaccessible to obtain an abortion. Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, Kentucky, Louisiana, and South Dakota now have a total ban on abortions with exceptions for patient health or mortality. These bans represent the most aggressive anti-abortion activity from states with Republican-controlled legislatures in decades.

Other states have also made it harder for doctors to perform abortions: Oklahoma’s governor signed a bill in April that made performing abortions a criminal offense punishable by up to 10 years in prison or a $100,000 fine. Alabama passed a law in 2019 to ban the procedure altogether and punish doctors who perform abortions with jail time.

States with strict abortion restrictions have high infant mortality rates

The states that are attempting to require the vast majority of pregnant people to give birth by force of law also happen to boast some of the worst health outcomes in the nation for both pregnant people and babies.

According to 2020 data from the Centers for Disease Control on infant death rates and a 2018 USA Today investigation on maternal mortality rates in the 46 states with available data, nearly all of the states who have recently passed restrictive bans on abortion rank in the top 10 states for maternal mortality, infant mortality, or both.

Louisiana, which will now have a complete ban on abortion, ranks first in the nation for maternal mortality, with 58.1 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births. The state ranked second in the nation in 2020 for infant mortality, with 7.33 infant deaths per 1,000 live births.
Mississippi’s trigger law will ban abortion at 20 weeks. The state ranked first in the nation in infant mortality in 2020 with 8.27 per 1,000 live births, and 19th in the nation for maternal mortality, with 20.8 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births.
West Virginia ranks third in infant mortality, with 7.45 deaths per 1000 live births. The state will likely ban abortions after 20 weeks.
Arkansas, which also has a total ban on abortion, ranked fourth in the nation for infant mortality with 7.33 deaths per 1,000 births and 4th in the nation for maternal mortality, with 37.5 deaths per 100,000 live births.
Alabama ranks fifth in the nation for infant deaths, with 7.4 deaths per 1,000 births, and 29th in the nation for maternal mortality with 18.7 deaths per 100,000 live births.
South Dakota, another state with a total ban on abortion, ranked sixth in the nation for infant deaths at 6.68 deaths per 1,000 live births.

Maternal mortality in the US rose by 26% between 2000 and 2014

A 2016 report from the American College of Obstetrics & Gynecology found that maternal mortality rose by 26% between 2000 and 2014. Black women are almost three times more likely and Native American women over four times more likely to die from childbirth-related complications than white mothers.

Researchers say nearly half of those deaths are preventable, attributing the heightened mortality rate to a number of factors. These included increases in the number of women with obesity and

diabetes

, insufficient OBGYN care in many places, and women having children at older ages and opting for more c-sections, as TIME reported in 2017.

Dianna Greene-Foster, a public health and reproductive rights scholar at UC San Francisco, told Wired in 2019 that given the mounting costs of healthcare and childcare, being denied an abortion is directly linked to higher levels of poverty and worse maternal bonding and childhood development outcomes — especially for patients who were already below the poverty line and/or had multiple children.

She also told Wired that pregnancy is a “major predictor of poverty in our country, not because of its prevalence but because we penalize every aspect of it … the supports we have for low-income women are not sufficient to keep them from falling into poverty.”

Over the past several years, Republican-controlled state legislatures have enacted costly restrictions on abortion clinics that forced many to close down, and slashed family planning funding for organizations like Planned Parenthood that provide low-cost contraceptive services, gynecological screenings, and other healthcare.

Researchers note that data collection and research on maternal mortality is spotty and inconsistent in the United States, and it’s difficult to isolate how much of the rise in maternal mortality is due to abortion clinic closures and decreases in access to affordable care. But medical professionals say a lack of adequate care can result in more dangerous outcomes for patients.

“If you have a patient who has a medical condition that increases her risk during pregnancy, and she has no access to contraception, and she gets pregnant, and she dies, that’s a death that could have been prevented if she had contraception or family planning,” University of Texas obstetrics & gynecology professor George Saade told the Texas Tribune in 2016.

Unsafe abortion isn’t currently a major contributing factor to maternal mortality in the US, but evidence from other nations shows that restricting abortion is associated with greater rates of maternal deaths from unsafe abortions and pregnancy complications, which occurred in Romania when the country banned both abortion and contraception under communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, as Wired noted.

On the flipside, Wired also pointed out that abortion was legalized again in the early 90s, Romania’s maternal mortality rate fell to half its previous rate, with researchers estimating that unsafe abortions accounted for 87% of maternal deaths. And in Nepal, maternal mortality also fell by more than half after the country made abortion legal in the early 2000s, despite an accompanying increase in abortion-related complications.

“These bans aren’t really about reducing abortion, they’re about reducing women’s freedom and access to care” argued Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner, the executive director of reproductive and maternal rights advocacy group MomsRising, in a phone interview with INSIDER.

Rowe-Finkbeiner and other advocates for abortion access argue that if such lawmakers were truly concerned with reducing abortion rates and protecting life at every stage, they would expand access to affordable contraception and sex education, and design policies to make healthcare and childcare more accessible — measures most states did not include along with abortion bans.

Row-Finkbeiner described the rise in anti-abortion legislation as “an attack on autonomy, sovereignty, and freedom” and “outrageous in a time when maternal and infant mortality are rising, especially so among black and Native American women.”

“Pro-life means more than just being against abortion.”

Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards, who signed Louisiana’s abortion ban into law, has long described himself as a pro-life Democrat. After Friday’s ruling, Edwards tweeted that being “pro-life means more than just being against abortion.”

His statement further touted his work expanding Medicaid in Louisiana and supporting public education initiatives. In 2018, his administration also created a “Healthy Moms, Healthy Babies” advisory council to address the racial disparities in maternal mortality in the state.

During her presidential campaign in 2019, Vice President Kamala Harris, who frequently highlighted the racial disparities in maternal mortality on the campaign trail, wrote in a tweet addressed to him: “…women have agency, women have value, women have authority to make decisions about their own lives—and we will not go backward.”

Harris called Friday’s Supreme Court ruling a “healthcare crisis” during a speech in Plainfield, Illinois.

“This is the first time in the history of our nation that a constitutional right has been taken away from the people of America,” Harris said.

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