A recent article in ProPublica is just the latest effort by pro-abortion researchers to spin cherrypicked data into a public health crisis.
Last week ProPublica published an article claiming that pro-life laws in Texas were responsible for a sharp rise in sepsis cases. ProPublica purchased seven years of Texas hospital-discharge data and purportedly found that, after the Texas Heartbeat Act took effect in 2021, the sepsis rate for hospitalizations due to second-trimester pregnancy losses iincreased by 50 percent. The ProPublica article received a great deal of uncritical coverage from a number of media outlets, including the New Republic, CNN, Mother Jones, Axios, and the Texas Tribune.
Not surprisingly, there is less here than meets the eye. The authors of the ProPublica article present data only on sepsis cases from hospitalizations involving a pregnancy loss between 13 and 21 weeks’ gestation. Taken at face value, the data show that, after the Texas Heartbeat Act took effect, there were an average of 28 more sepsis cases every year. Sepsis is a serious issue, but an annual increase of 28 cases should not be blown out of proportion, considering that there are over 31 million people living in Texas and close to 400,000 children born in Texas every year.
Furthermore, recent research from the Journal of the American Medical Association shows that recently enacted pro-life laws disproportionately increase the likelihood that African-American women and Hispanic women will carry pregnancies to term. Given that both of those demographic groups have above-average sepsis rates, that could be skewing the results.
It is also worth noting that the charts presented in the article are misleading. The sepsis rate in Texas is not 4.9 percent among pregnant women. Again, the denominator is hospitalizations involving a pregnancy loss between 13 weeks and 21 weeks’ gestation. That is a much smaller number.
Unsurprisingly, the authors of ProPublica article try to create a narrative of a public health crisis in Texas. However, they fail to report their own finding that hospitalizations involving second-trimester pregnancy losses fell by 9.3 percent after the Texas Heartbeat Act took effect. They also mention the increase in maternal mortality in Texas. However, while it is true that maternal mortality increased in 2021, maternal mortality declined significantly in 2022 — when even stronger pro-life laws were in effect. Of course, the authors make no mention of this.
Texas has become a leader in enacting pro-life policies. It is unsurprising that pro-abortion researchers and their allies in the media have worked overtime to try to gather evidence of a public health crisis in the Lone Star State. For instance, a study in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2016 claimed that after Texas defunded Planned Parenthood in 2011, Medicaid births significantly increased. However, on closer examination, the study found that 37 additional women in one state-funded contraception program had a Medicaid-funded birth. This latest ProPublica article is just the latest effort by pro-abortion researchers to spin cherrypicked data into a public health crisis.