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For more than a year, since the United States Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, pregnant women faced a radically different landscape of challenges and choices as the number of abortion providers fell to zero in more than a dozen states.
But the precise impact of the decision has been difficult for researchers to measure directly, especially when it comes to a central question: how many more babies are born as a result of the abortion ban?
On Thursday, researchers from Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health published one of the first serious attempts at an answer. They focused on Texas, where a law that took effect in September 2021, nine months before the court’s Dobbs ruling, effectively banned abortion at six weeks. The analysis found that the state recorded almost 10,000 more births between April and December last year than would have been expected without the law, or 3% more.
The finding, which has cheered abortion opponents, could suggest a staggering number of pregnancies carried to term that otherwise might not have been, had it not been for the law known as the Bill Senate Bill 8.
Researchers monitoring new abortion bans across the country expect births to increase, but perhaps not that significantly.
“It looks like they’ve demonstrated that births have increased more in Texas than we expected,” said Caitlin Myers, an economics professor at Middlebury College who studies abortion but was not involved in the survey. ‘study. “The conclusion I’m less comfortable making at this point is that all of these excess births are due to SB 8. Some of them may be, but I don’t think all of them will be. is simply too high.
The authors of the study, which was published as a two-page research letter in the Journal of the American Medical Association, also stopped attributing their estimated rise in births solely to the unusual law, which allows civil suits against those who facilitate abortions after fetal heart activity begins, usually around six weeks. The results at least suggest that “not everyone who could have had an abortion in the absence of SB 8 was able to get one,” they wrote.
Yet the authors were confident in their methods and results.
“This model was unique to Texas,” said Alison Gemmill, a professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and one of the study’s researchers. She said the team looked at each of the other 49 states and Washington, DC, but found no evidence of differences in the number of expected births. If there were other explanations for the increase, she added, they would have to be unique to Texas and the period after abortion law SB 8 came into effect.
Quantifying the effect of abortion bans has been difficult for researchers due to a delay in obtaining detailed birth data.
In other states where abortion bans went into effect after the Dobbs decision in June 2022, researchers continue to collect vital statistics to study the effect of the new bans on births. These bans were expected to have an even greater effect on people seeking abortions than SB 8 in Texas, as many of them banned all abortions and were enacted in many jurisdictions. ‘contiguous states, making it difficult for women to travel. to other states for procedures.
The study published Thursday, which looked at data dating back to 2016, relied on provisional birth data for 2022 because more complete data was not available. It did not include demographic information such as the mother’s age or race that could be compared to previous years and used to understand other factors that may have played a role.
The researchers then created a statistical model of what Texas would have looked like without the abortion law. With this, they were able to estimate the number of births that would have occurred in this case.
“It’s an indirect way to measure what we can’t measure,” Ms Gemmill said. “We don’t know the decisions behind whether people sought abortions or couldn’t.”
Wider changes in birth rates have complicated the researchers’ efforts. The number of births has decreased in recent years in Texas, and across the United States, a trend that was exacerbated at the height of the Covid emergency. But there has been an increase in births since the pandemic in Texas: there were around 389,000 births last year, up from 398,000 in 2016, but more than the number recorded in 2020.
Other factors may have led to higher birth trends during this period, Ms. Myers said, including an increase in the number of foreign-born mothers giving birth, many of them in Texas. Ms Gemmill said that factor was difficult to measure without detailed birth demographics in 2022.
Despite the new restrictions under SB 8, many Texas women still got abortions, either by having them before the six-week deadline, by traveling out of state for their procedures, or by taking abortion medication themselves. Texas saw a flood of mail-order pills, and some Texans were able to get abortions in Mexico.
Yet anti-abortion activists have taken the Johns Hopkins study as evidence that their success in severely limiting abortions in Texas had had the desired effect: more pregnancies carried to term.
“Every baby saved from elective abortion should be celebrated!” John Seago, president of Texas Right to Life, said in a statement. “This new study highlights the significant success of our movement over the past two years, and we look forward to helping mothers and families across our state care for their children.”
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