(LifeSiteNews) — A recent study acknowledges that maternal deaths actually declined after the U.S. Supreme Court’s June 2022 overturn of Roe v. Wade, though mainstream medical commentators insist the two are not related.
Medpage Today reported Tuesday on a study by University of Colorado-Boulder researchers and published the same day in JAMA Network Open, finding that maternal deaths dropped 28.2 percent from August 2022, two months after Roe’s fall, through January 2023.
However, the authors conclude the drop “appeared to be driven by elevated levels of maternal death during the 2021 spike in COVID-19-related deaths.”
“For example, 74 percent of the 125-death decline in the 12-month sum between August and September 2022 was caused by excluding August 2021 deaths from the September 12-month sum,” they wrote. “Similarly high proportions of declines September 2022 to February 2023 are explained by deaths 12 months before.”
Even if the drop was not attributable to the wave of newly enforceable pro-life laws, however, the study provides further evidence that pro-life laws do not increase maternal deaths, as pro-abortion activists claim.
In July, Catholic University of America professor and Charlotte Lozier Institute scholar Michael New responded to a scorecard put out by the pro-abortion Commonwealth Fund claiming pro-life states were worse on metrics such as maternal deaths.
“The scorecard does not compare pre-Dobbs data to post-Dobbs data,” he wrote. “All it shows is that some states with strong pro-life laws fare poorly on some public-health metrics. The problem is that many states with strong protections for the preborn are also states with above-average poverty rates. In general, states with high poverty rates also tend to have below-average public-health outcomes. Overall, poverty is a cause of poor public health, not pro-life laws.”
New also noted that data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) actually indicates that maternal mortality decreased by 16 percent between 2022 and 2023, and that data from around the world associates pro-life protections with better health outcomes for mothers.
Further, abortion restrictions cannot endanger maternal health because they do not prevent maternal care.
While some emergency situations in pregnancy can necessitate treatments indirectly resulting in a child’s death, numerous medical experts attest that intentionally killing a preborn baby is never medically necessary. Regardless, every state in the union with abortion prohibitions currently in effect also permits doctors to administer life-saving, non-abortive treatment to pregnant women even if it comes at the expense of a baby’s life.
Pro-abortion activists have long sought to keep abortion debates focused on such situations to divert attention from the vast majority of abortions that are sought for far less “sympathetic” reasons. They have gotten mileage out of that approach, which has helped defeat pro-lifers in state ballot referendums and convinced national Republicans to take a more moderate stance on life this year.
However, data released in May by the pro-life Charlotte Lozier Institute, covering roughly 123,000 abortions across eight states in 2021 (the last full year that Roe v. Wade mandated legal abortion nationwide), found that alleged “risks to a woman’s life or a major bodily function” constituted just 0.3 percent of women’s reasons for abortion.