(LifeSiteNews) — At least 22,180 more babies were born in states that banned abortion after the reversal of Roe v. Wade through 2023 than otherwise would have been if Roe was still in effect, according to new research out of Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Analyzing “birth certificate and U.S. Census data from 2012 through 2023 for all 50 states and the District of Columbia changes in fertility rates—measured as live births per 1,000 females aged 15-44,” the researchers estimated fertility rates before and after the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs ruling overturning Roe allowed elected branches of government to decide abortion policy for the first time in half a century.
That ruling allowed abortion bans to take effect in more than a dozen states, and the analysis reports that, in 14 of them, the bans “resulted in 22,180 additional live births and 478 additional infant deaths above what would have been expected in the absence of these bans” (those 478 would have been killed via abortion regardless).
The number of babies saved doesn’t include those born in 2024 or 2025, nor does it take into account more recent abortion bans in several states, such as Indiana, Florida, Iowa, and South Carolina, meaning that the total figure is likely much higher.
“These findings indicate that many pregnant people [i.e., women] were unable to overcome barriers to access abortion services and instead were forced to continue an unwanted or unsafe pregnancy to term,” said study co-lead Dr. Suzanne Bell, assistant professor in the Bloomberg School’s Department of Population, Family and Reproductive Health. “Importantly, we find the effects of these abortion bans are not uniformly felt, with the largest estimated impacts on fertility among populations experiencing the greatest structural disadvantages and in states with among the worst maternal and child health outcomes.”
In other words, more babies from racial minority groups and lower-income backgrounds were spared being killed by abortion.
While the university’s takeaway fixates on “unequal impacts” among various identity groups, the findings show both that abortion bans save lives and that America still has far to go in order to fully protect preborn babies.
The abortion lobby has been working feverishly to cancel out those deterrents via deregulated interstate distribution of abortion pills, legal protection and financial support of interstate abortion travel, constructing new abortion facilities near borders shared by pro-life and pro-abortion states, making liberal states sanctuaries for those who want to evade or violate the laws of more pro-life neighbors, and embedding abortion “rights” in state constitutions.
While the Hopkins study shows that the feasibility of doing so is far from guaranteed, the variance of laws from state to state allows residents of a pro-life state to travel to a pro-abortion one to have their child killed, and abortion pills can easily be mailed across state lines and taken in private, which cannot easily be prevented once the package has been sent.
Last year, the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute published research finding that 63 percent of abortions in 2023 were committed via pills, continuing a steady rise from zero percent since 2000, when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) first approved mifepristone for abortion.
Pro-life advocates continue to call for a complete nationwide ban on abortion, and Rep. Eric Burlison (R-MO) recently reintroduced the Life at Conception Act, which would expressly recognize preborn children as persons qualifying for equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment. How far such measures will fare in the current Republican Party remains to be seen.
President Donald Trump has taken a number of pro-life actions since returning to office, but he opposes further federal restrictions on abortion, and said on the campaign trail that he would not enforce federal law prohibiting abortion pills from being dispensed by mail. In what pro-lifers hope might signal the beginning of a reversal on that position, new Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has said that Trump has asked him to study the dangers of abortifacient drugs.