Are anti-abortion measures pro-life, as their proponents claim? Two years after the US Supreme Court's decision to leave it up to each state to decide whether or not to allow abortion on its territory, two studies published in June in the Journal of the American Medical Association have shown the potentially deadly consequences of restricting access to abortion.
To study these effects, Texas served as a case study for four American researchers from Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore) and Michigan State University. From September 1, 2021, the Lone Star State has in effect banned all abortions following the detection of embryonic heart activity, which generally occurs after six weeks of pregnancy, with the exception of medical emergencies not defined in this text known as SB8.
Following this decision, it emerged that infant deaths in the state rose by almost 13%, whereas in the rest of the country, infant mortality rose by less than 2% over the same period. In 2022, 2,240 infants under the age of 1 died in Texas, more than half of them in the neonatal period, in other words before 28 days of life. In 2021, there were 1,985 infant deaths, a difference deemed statistically significant.
"This study confirms the results of other research, but it is the first truly conclusive and scientifically rigorous study on the subject," said Magali Barbieri, a demographer at the French National Institute of Population Studies and associate researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved in the study.
Among the causes identified for this rise in infant mortality, one has stood out: Congenital anomalies in Texas children increased by 22.9% between 2021 and 2022, while they decreased by 3.1% in the rest of the country. Congenital diseases are structural or functional defects present from birth that may be the result of genetic, infectious, nutritional or environmental factors, often with undetermined causes. In the US, it is the leading cause of infant death, responsible for one in five deaths. While the detection of a congenital disease would surely have prompted some women to terminate their pregnancy, this data has shown, according to the authors, that Texas law has forced many of them to continue.
Among other causes, the study has also shown a rise in unintentional injuries (+ 20.7%) and an increase in maternal complications during pregnancy (+ 18.2%), but Alison Gemmill, first author of the article, said that she didn't dwell on these results, "because the numbers are quite small, which means that the increases seen between 2021 and 2022 could be due to chance."
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