A New Study Confirms That the Texas Abortion Ban “Is Responsible” for a Rise in Infant Deaths– www.thenation.com

Researchers with Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health found that infant deaths rose by nearly 13 percent in 2022. Comparatively, these deaths, defined in the study as occurring under 12 months old, increased less than 2 percent in the rest of the United States.

“We found that infant mortality increased pretty substantially in Texas, but not in the rest of the country,” Alison Gemmill, assistant professor in the Bloomberg School’s Department of Population, Family and Reproductive Health and one of the study’s lead authors, tells The Nation. “It speaks to how these restrictive laws can have horrific and devastating effects on infant health, pregnant people, and on families overall—unintended or not.”

While many reproductive health studies (including ones that show a link among infant mortality and abortion bans) can only prove a correlation between factors, this one notably claims a direct causation, providing important evidence of the law’s dire impacts. “This study shows that the state policy is responsible for these deaths—there is a very, very strong causal link here,” says Gemmill.