After abortion bans, infant mortality and births increased, research finds
Overall, infant mortality was 6 percent higher than expected in states that implemented abortion bans, said Alison Gemmill, one of the researchers, who is a demographer and perinatal epidemiologist in the department of population, family, and reproductive health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. That number reflected increases in nine states, decreases in four, and no change in one.
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Gemmill said that among non-Hispanic Black infants, mortality was 11 percent higher after abortion bans were implemented than would have been expected. Also, there were more babies born with congenital birth defects, situations in which women have been able to terminate their pregnancies if not for abortion bans.
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Overall, the researchers found that in the states that implemented near-total abortion bans or bans after six weeks' gestation during that period, there were 478 more deaths of babies in their first year of life after the bans were implemented than would have been expected based on previous years' data.
Birth rate increases were higher among communities with socioeconomic disadvantages and in states that have the worst maternal and child health outcomes.
'What happens when you ban abortion is that you create enormous inequality in access to abortion,' said Caitlin Myers of Middlebury College, who studies similar abortion data but was not involved in the new research.
The studies evaluated data from birth and death certificates and census records for all 50 states from January 2012 through December 2023. That time frame allowed researchers to compare trends in births and infant mortality in the years before the Supreme Court overturned the national right to abortion in June 2022 with data in the 18 months afterward.
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At the time, 14 states had implemented near-total abortion bans or bans after six weeks' gestation during that period. Now 16 have.
While national data has shown that, because of factors like telemedicine and out-of-state travel, overall abortion rates have actually increased since the Supreme Court's ruling, but that does not mean that everyone who needed or sought an abortion could obtain one, Myers said.
She said the research showed that two dynamics were behind the increase in infant mortality. One aspect is that when women are not allowed to end pregnancies of fetuses with congenital anomalies, the babies often die within days or weeks after birth.
The other aspect is that women who cannot obtain abortions by traveling to other states or by ordering pills by mail, are 'more likely to be poor, more likely to be women of color, and those populations have higher rates of maternal morbidity and mortality, infant complications, infant mortality,' Myers said.
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