CDC: Maternal Health Figures Improving Post-Dobbs

We all heard the sky-is-falling takes after Dobbs was announced: Pregnant people won’t be able to access life-saving care! Women will be dying in the streets! Doctors will be jailed for trying to save their patients! If you’re happy about the Supreme Court’s decision, you’re a monster!

Inconveniently for the abortion industry narrative, the assumption that Dobbs would increase maternal mortality has been disproven. Instead, maternal mortality substantially declined after Dobbs, according to new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Let’s be careful not to make the inverse mistake of our opponents. It’s not that Dobbs caused the decline. Maternal mortality was unusually high during the COVID-19 pandemic; deaths have now returned their pre-COVID baseline. That baseline was not great. There is still a lot of work to be done (and if you want to donate in this area, we can’t say enough good things about Abide Women’s Health). The point is just that protecting babies from abortion hasn’t made the situation any worse, defying pro-abortion media predictions.

This outcome would not surprise anyone who paid attention to other nations’ experiences with introducing pro-life policy. As the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists (AAPLOG) points out:

Research from diverse countries around the world has repeatedly shown that abortion laws do not worsen maternal mortality. Malta and Poland, two countries with robust pro-life laws, have some of the lowest maternal mortality rates in the world.

Meanwhile, there is substantial evidence that Dobbs has saved tens of thousands of babies from abortion. Those children get to live, while maternal mortality is unchanged from a few years ago. There is no need to pit mothers against their offspring.

[Photo credit: Alexander Grey on Unsplash]