Have you heard the liberal refrain that banning abortion does not prevent abortions from happening? It turns out that is a bogus statement, as a new study from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health confirms.

The study proved what pro-lifers already knew: Banning abortion saves lives. It found that, in Texas , there were an additional 9,799 live births between April and December 2022 due to the state's abortion restrictions.

Although many states had trigger bans take effect after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022, Texas enacted a heartbeat bill with a civil enforcement mechanism in September 2021; it remained in effect until late August 2022, when the state’s trigger law took effect . Therefore, Texas was able to start saving lives with strong pro-life protections before most states.

One of the study’s lead authors, Alison Gemmill, assistant professor in the Bloomberg School’s Department of Population, Family, and Reproductive Health, admitted the ban is effective, even though she seems to support legal abortion.

“Although our study doesn't detail why these extra births occurred, our findings strongly suggest that a considerable number of pregnant individuals in Texas were unable to overcome barriers to abortion access,” Gemmill said in a press release .

Another lead author, Suzanne Bell, assistant professor in the same Bloomberg department, expressed a similar sentiment, even though she also seemed unhappy that the ban is saving lives.

“The study’s findings highlight how abortion bans have real implications for birthing people, thousands of whom may have had no choice but to continue an unwanted or unsafe pregnancy to term,” Bell said in the release.

Banning abortion does not stop every abortion, but bans help make abortion less common, as do policies that decrease demand for abortion , including improving pregnancy prevention and increasing support for mothers facing unplanned pregnancies.

Plus, banning abortion may prevent unwanted pregnancies in the first place; some men in red states who do not want children have decided to get vasectomies to eliminate the possibility of impregnating women.

Conversely, legalizing abortion makes the practice more common. After Ireland legalized abortion via referendum in 2018, the number of Irish women having abortions spiked. The high estimates said about 5,000 Irish women had abortions each year before they became legal; they got abortions by traveling to the United Kingdom or the Netherlands or by having illegal chemical abortions in Ireland. In 2019, when abortion became legal, 7,041 Irish women had abortions, according to the Iona Institute . That means that in one year alone, at least 2,000 innocent lives were lost because the country legalized abortion.

The reality contradicts bogus research from pro-abortion organizations such as the Guttmacher Institute and the World Health Organization. These organizations argue that because countries where abortion is illegal and countries where it is legal have similar abortion rates, this means banning abortion does not reduce the abortion rate. Their dishonest methods compare poor, developing countries in Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East to highly developed, wealthier countries with widespread access to contraception and robust social safety nets.

So while the pro-life movement has plenty of work to do to make the United States a country that respects life from conception to natural death, the increase in live births in Texas is a positive sign that abortion bans work. While they may not completely solve the problem, these bans help and are a necessary step in the journey to end abortion.

Tom Joyce ( @TomJoyceSports ) is a political reporter for the New Boston Post in Massachusetts.