A new study in the Journal of the American Medical Association presents data showing a link between Texas’s new anti-abortion law and an increase in the state’s infant mortality rate, USA Today reports. “It just points to some of the devastating consequences of abortion bans that maybe people weren’t thinking about when they passed these laws,” co-author Alison Gemmill, an assistant professor at The Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health, said.
It shouldn’t be a shock that when you force pregnant patients to give birth to neonates that have no reasonable chance of survival because of in utero developmental defects, you’re going to have an increase in infant death. And you’re also going to have a significant increase in the grief, depression, and damage to the families impacted by the death of an infant after a government-demanded full-term pregnancy.
Texas already has the 18th worst maternal mortality rate in America, 20% higher than the national average. Future data will show increase in the state’s maternal mortality rate as patients are denied treatment for problem pregnancies. Also not a shocker: the 17 states ranking higher are all “red states” or recently red states like Virginia and Arizona. If you look at the data, living in a Gulf Coast state adds a level of lethality to pregnancy.