A stark headline from the Trib.
In the last two years, Texas abortion clinics closed, legal challenges raced through the court system, towns tried to ban out-of-state travel, conservative activists made abortion pills and emergency rooms into battlegrounds, and woman after woman after woman came forward with stories of medical care delayed or denied because of confusion over Texas’ abortion laws.
And five women were able to get an abortion, on average, each month.
Texas, with 30 million residents and 10% of the women of reproductive age in the nation, used to see about 4,400 abortions a month.
Now, five.
State data, which is available only through January 2024, shows some months, no abortions were performed at all; there were never more than 10 in one month.
The drop in abortions in Texas is so large it’s difficult to visualize in numbers: a 99.89% decline, a sheer cliff face on a line graph. But the meaning behind the metrics is perhaps even more difficult to discern.
For abortion-rights advocates, each missing number represents an individual in turmoil — a life derailed by an unintended pregnancy or a heartbreaking pregnancy complication worsened by delayed medical care.
Across the aisle, this number represents a dream achieved and evidence that the laws are working, both in banning elective abortions and ensuring women who need to terminate for medical reasons are able to. If some women have been able to get an abortion — the laws can’t be that restrictive, can they?
Of course, these numbers don’t tell the whole story. They don’t capture the frantic trips out of state, the pills secreted in a bathroom, the forays over the border, all the ways Texans are managing to terminate their pregnancies despite the laws.
But two years after the June 2022 Dobbs ruling overturned Roe v. Wade, those abortions tell us a lot about how Texas’ laws are working — exactly as designed.
Yes, they are. That’s the message, full stop. It will be that way until we vote in a different state government, or we get federal action, which at the least requires winning back the House as well as re-electing President Biden and holding the Senate. This is what’s on the ballot in November.
There’s a lot more to the story above, and it gets into the underground mifepristone delivery network, which is the cause of some uncountable number of abortions, as well as the many people now travelling out of state for an abortion. Both are already targets of the forced birth fanatics and will continue to be so.
We also have previous reporting on the number of rape-induced pregnancies in Texas, and as of this week we have news of a significant rise in infant mortality.
In the wake of Texas’ abortion ban, the state’s infant death rate increased and more died of birth defects, a study published Monday shows.
The analysis out of Johns Hopkins University is the latest research to find higher infant mortality rates in states with abortion restrictions.
The researchers looked at how many infants died before their first birthday after Texas adopted its abortion ban in September 2021. They compared infant deaths in Texas to those in 28 states — some also with restrictions. The researchers calculated that there were 216 more deaths in Texas than expected between March and December the next year.
In Texas, the 2022 mortality rate for infants went up 8% to 5.75 per 1,000 births, compared to a 2% increase in the rest of the U.S., according to the study in the journal JAMA Pediatrics.
Among causes of deaths, birth defects showed a 23% increase, compared to a decrease of about 3% in the rest of the U.S. The Texas law blocks abortions after the detection of cardiac activity, usually five or six weeks into pregnancy, well before tests are done to detect fetal abnormalities.
“I think these findings make clear the potentially devastating consequences that abortion bans can have,” said co-author Suzanne Bell, a fertility researcher.
Unlike those other items, you can expect the Republicans to take no action on this. It’s not their concern. It’s all about November, y’all. Reform Austin has more.
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