American maternity care is in crisis. Abortion bans are making it worse.

When will the anti-abortion movement turn its attention to saving babies?

Photo by Christian Bowen on Unsplash

Between 2010 and 2022, some 500 maternity wards closed across the United States, leaving a majority of rural hospitals with no labor and delivery units. And those numbers are from before the Dobbs decision came down and allowed for the criminalization of abortion — a move that pushed even more obstetricians out of conservative states, and made access to maternity care even scarcer.

Now, anti-abortion Republicans are putting their resources not into expanding care for the women they’re forcing into motherhood, but into enforcing abortion bans — including those that make women risk their lives and health in pregnancy, drive up maternal injury and mortality, and push health care providers out of the workforce or out of state. State budgets are limited, and how lawmakers spend the money they have tells us a lot. Idaho, for example, is using some of its dollars to fight a Biden administration rule requiring that hospitals do what’s necessary to save women’s lives and preserve their health, even if that means offering them an emergency abortion.

Let that sink in: The state of Idaho, which has lost nearly a quarter of its practicing OB/GYNs and has seen several labor and delivery wards close since banning abortion, is spending taxpayer dollars to argue that they do not have to save a woman’s health in a medical emergency if she is pregnant and the best course of action is a termination.

I highlight this case next to the data on the closures of labor and delivery wards because these things are, in fact, related — and not just because abortion bans are sending doctors fleeing and forcing maternity ward closures, although they are. Abortion bans are not single issues fought for by a single-issue party; they are part of a much broader kaleidoscope of policies or lackthereof that all reflect a particular worldview. And that worldview cannot in any credible way be described as “pro-life.”