With all of the disastrous, world-imperilling decisions being made by Donald Trump, it’s easy to forget that less than three years ago the US Supreme Court stripped women of their fundamental right to bodily autonomy in Dobbs vs Jackson Women’s Health. In the years since, conservative states have set about banning abortion. Now, we’re starting to see the consequences of those bans. A study published this month in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that, since the Supreme Court ruling in June 2022, there has been an almost 6 per cent relative increase in infant mortality rates in states that subsequently banned abortion. Among black infants in these supposedly “pro-life” states, there was a relative increase of 11 per cent in mortality.
This is not a surprise. All over the world, when abortion is banned, women and babies die – a fact confirmed by numerous studies. Higher levels of infant and maternal mortality were wholly predictable outcomes of the Dobbs decision. Even before it, US states that restricted abortion had higher infant morality rates than those that didn’t. Abortion opponents pushed near-total bans anyway.
Some of these deaths are likely infants who were diagnosed with serious foetal anomalies in utero. One of the cruelties of American abortion bans is that many states offer no exemptions for such cases, meaning women with wanted pregnancies who are told their babies will not survive are still forced to carry them for nine months, endure congratulations from well-meaning strangers, endure the pain and permanent physical changes of childbirth, and then watch their baby suffer and die. (Another cruelty is that many of these same states offer no exceptions for rape or incest.)
Increased infant deaths are also a result of the profound inequalities that characterise reproductive rights in the US. If you live in a Democratic state, you (for the most part) still enjoy the right to make your own childbearing decisions. If you live in a Republican state, you might still be able to access abortion care – if you have the resources and the courage to act in defiance of unjust laws. Women with money and the right information can travel out of state for abortions; others can order abortion pills online, although conservative states are cracking down on this too. Earlier this month a New York doctor was criminally charged in Louisiana and fined $100,000 in Texas for prescribing abortion pills to women – a legal practice where the doctor lives and works. The eventual outcome of her case may determine just how accessible abortion pills remain in the US.
But even if it remains possible to get abortion pills online, women must know about that option in order to access them. And many don’t. Some are very young (the Indiana attorney general started proceedings to sue a hospital on the grounds of patient privacy because one of its doctors performed an abortion for a ten-year-old rape victim and then shared the story with the press, before the lawsuit was later dropped). Some women are poor or even homeless. Some are struggling with addiction or mental illness, while others have developmental delays or cognitive challenges.
But the circumstances don’t need to be extreme. If you’re a pregnant, broke young woman who isn’t part of the progressive social media universe in which information about abortion pills is shared regularly, you may go to your doctor who will tell you that abortion is illegal and that you must have this baby. Even doctors who support abortion rights may not tell women about their options: Texas, for example, has introduced laws targeting anyone “aiding and abetting” abortion, allowing Americans to sue any person – a doctor, a friend, an Uber driver – who knowingly helps a woman end her pregnancy. That means in Texas, telling a woman how to get abortion pills could bankrupt you; if you’re a doctor, it could mean the end of your career. Women in abortion-hostile states may find themselves without information about how to get an abortion, and unable to ask lest they put a friend, family member or healthcare provider at serious legal risk.
Studies show that most women who have abortions are already mothers: they know exactly what it means to raise a baby and often decide to forgo or delay having another because of their circumstances. These women know that having another baby will jeopardise hopes for their and their children’s futures.
And they’re right: research published last June in the Journal of Public Economics found that laws regulating access to abortion directly contribute to a decrease in black women’s college completion by 6 per cent. Long-term studies have found that women who have sought abortions and were refused face a host of problems compared to those who were able to access abortions. Women unable to get terminations are more likely to stay with abusive men. They have worse mental health. They end up poorer and are more likely to be on welfare. Their children end up worse off. They are more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes. Women who are able to access abortions, by contrast, not only do better personally and financially, but are more likely to have planned and wanted children later.
It has been widely reported that several women in the US have already died due to abortion bans. Now, researchers have found that hundreds of infants have too. The reaction from these anti-abortion states has been to curtail data collection and disregard reality – if there’s no documentation of women dying, did it happen at all? Georgia, for example, dismantled its committee on maternal mortality after journalists were told of pregnant women dying from preventable deaths.
In the meantime, the dishonestly named “pro-life” movement is pushing to make abortion bans national. They want the Trump administration to exert whatever authority it has – and even authority it doesn’t have – to outlaw abortion across the country.
Trump has so far refrained, but he has been busy engaging in a historic executive power grab. Though he said on the campaign trail that he wants to leave abortion decisions to the states, now that he’s in office, he seems uninterested in leaving much of anything – particularly when it comes to power – to anyone but himself. This administration, staffed with numerous men accused of sexual wrongdoing, has bizarrely positioned itself as a defender of women’s rights, even as it bans the word “gender” from government use. Trump’s executive orders have barred transgender girls and women from competing in women’s sports, a move the administration and its supporters have framed as protecting women – as if a transgender 16-year-old is a bigger threat to collective female well-being than laws mandating we risk our lives being forced to have babies.
The Republican Party has long claimed to support life. But the anti-abortion movement and the Trump administration have instead ushered in an era of death and destruction.
[See also: Europe faces its fate as an American colony]
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This article appears in the 19 Feb 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Europe Alone