Study: abortion bans aren’t increasing maternal mortality
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Since Dobbs, we’ve heard endlessly about how abortion restrictions are going to increase maternal mortality and how pro-life states have higher maternal mortality rates than pro-choice states and things like that.
This 2026 study decided to take a closer look: “US Abortion Bans and Pregnancy Associated Mortality.” And spoiler, they could not find a relationship between abortion bans and higher maternal mortality.
And it’s not just that the pro-life states had higher maternal mortality but it wasn’t quite statistically significant. It’s that it was all over the place. If they treat all of the pro-choice states as the reference point, the pro-life states actually had a very slightly lower maternal mortality, although again not statistically significant.
They actually looked at several different ways of measuring mortality: pregnancy-related mortality; maternal mortality, which is slightly different; non-obstetric causes of death. And in every case, there was no statistically significant difference between the states with bans and the states without them.
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