Pregnant women dying in Texas "skyrocketed" following state's abortion ban

A disturbing new report prepared exclusively for NBC News has found that the number of women in Texas who died while pregnant, during labor or soon after childbirth skyrocketed following the state’s draconian 2021 abortion ban — far outpacing a slower rise in maternal mortality across the nation. The Texas Legislature banned abortion care as early as five weeks into pregnancy when it passed Senate Bill 8 in September 2021, nearly a year before the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, so the state serves as a ominous harbinger for what will happen in other states that passed Trump abortion bans after the fall of Roe.From 2019 to 2022, the rate of maternal mortality cases in Texas rose by 56%, compared with just 11% nationwide during the same time period, according to an analysis by the Gender Equity Policy Institute. The nonprofit research group scoured publicly available reports from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and shared the analysis exclusively with NBC News.“There’s only one explanation for this staggering difference in maternal mortality,” said Nancy L. Cohen, president of the GEPI. “All the research points to Texas’ abortion ban as the primary driver of this alarming increase.” The study showed that even though Texas' maternal mortality rates increased in 2020 due to the pandemic, they increased even further in 2021 — the year the state's abortion ban took place — among all racial groups studied.Among Hispanic women, the rate of women dying while pregnant, during childbirth or soon after increased from 14.5 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births in 2019 to 18.9 in 2022. Rates among white women nearly doubled — from 20 per 100,000 to 39.1. And Black women, who historically have higher chances of dying while pregnant, during childbirth or soon after, saw their rates go from 31.6 to 43.6 per 100,000 live births. While maternal mortality spiked overall during the pandemic, women dying while pregnant or during childbirth rose consistently in Texas following the state’s ban on abortion, according to the Gender Equity Policy Institute.I’ll note here that if you look at the graph provided in the NBC News story, it appears that maternal mortality rates dropped for Black and Hispanic women between 2021 and 2022, but continued to rise for white women. But among all three groups, and overall, mortality rates in Texas were higher in 2022 than in 2019.NBC reports that beyond the immediate dangers of pregnancy and childbirth, there is growing evidence that women living in states with these cruel and oppressive abortion bans, such as in Texas, are far more likely to go without prenatal care and much less likely to find an appointment with an OB-GYN. NBC shares the experience of Dr. Leah Tatum, an OB-GYN in private practice in Austin, who says she never saw fear in her patients until Texas passed its abortion ban. Tatum also reports that requests for sterilization procedures among her patients doubled after the ban went into effect.That is, women prefer to lose their ability to ever have children over the chance that they might become pregnant following SB 8.“Patients feel like they’re backed into a corner,” Tatum said. “If they already knew that they didn’t want to pursue pregnancy, now they’re terrified.”Tatum said she’s seeing many women in their late 30s and 40s who, even though they’d like to have a child, worry they wouldn’t have an option to end the pregnancy if it turned out that the baby wouldn’t be born healthy. “‘What happens if I end up with a genetically abnormal fetus?’” Tatum said her patients have asked her. They worry their options are limited, she said. ‘Treated like a criminal’Given how Republicans are obsessed with more women having more babies - and having that be their sole function in life - it seems like the Trump abortion bans could be having the opposite effect.Here’s a video of an NBC News report on this study that includes the story of Kaitlyn Kash, who nearly died giving birth due to a delay in getting proper care: YouTube VideoThere's only ONE way to stop this madness in our country, and that's to VOTE HARRIS-WALZ and VOTE BLUE.