Why Are Pregnant Women More Likely to Die in "Pro-Life" States?

A new study finds there are two Americas, and in the supposedly "pro-life" one, mothers are twice as likely to die. And what happens to the women who live?

Photo by mali desha on Unsplash

Women who live in states that ban abortion are almost twice as likely to die during pregnancy, childbirth, and the immediate postpartum period than women who live in states that allow the procedure, a new study from the Gender Equity Policy Institute finds.

Radically divergent maternal health outcomes between pro-choice and supposedly “pro-life” states pre-date the Dobbs decision, which stripped the constitutional right to privacy from women and allowed states to ban abortion. But the gap has gotten even more extreme. Which says a lot, doesn’t it? Even when they couldn’t criminalize abortion, states that claimed to care about “life” weren’t doing much to keep pregnant women alive, and were doing even less to help women and their babies after those children were born. Now that they can ban abortion and usher in a so-called “culture of life”? More women are dying.

Oh, and the states where abortion is still legal? Maternal mortality in those states has dropped by 21%.

To put this in starker terms: If you’re a woman in Texas, your risk of maternal death is 155% higher than it would be if you lived in California.

And if you’re a Black woman in a state that bans abortion, you’re far worse off. In abortion-hostile states, Black women are more than three times as likely to die in pregnancy, childbirth, or soon after birth as White women. But outcomes for White women are bad, too. In Texas, for example, where abortion was banned before the Supreme Court issued its decision in Dobbs, White women’s maternal mortality went up by 95% in 2022, the first full year Texas’s abortion ban was in place.

With Donald Trump and America’s “pro-life” party in the White House, cuts are also coming to already-frayed support systems for pregnant women, mothers, and babies. Medicaid, which pays for 40% of births in the US and is how low-income Americans get healthcare, is on the chopping block. In the least shocking outcome of all time, it turns out that the people who claimed to want to ban abortion to save babies didn’t really care about saving babies. They cared about making women’s lives poor, harder, more miserable, and more deadly.

They’re succeeding.

Every time I use the term “pro-life” in a piece, even in scare-quotes, I get emails complaining that the term is a misnomer. And of course it is! That’s the point: The “pro-life” movement is among the most hypocritical, deceitful movements in modern American history, rivaled only by “states rights” as code for “segregation forever” and “Make America Great Again” as shorthand for “destroy the global economy and abuse as many brown people as you can.” The absolute gall of being a movement that claims to protect life when, in reality, you primarily advocate policies that simply immiserate women and their children — and kill a lot of them — is truly stunning.

“There are two Americas for reproductive-aged women and people who can become pregnant in the United States,” Nancy Cohen, the founder of the Gender Equity Policy Institute., told The 19th. “One America, where you’re at serious risk of major health complications or death if you become pregnant, and one where you’re most likely to have a positive birth experience, a healthy pregnancy and a healthy child.”

She’s right. But the lives of women in the two Americas are even more different than that.