As Death Rate Surges, Texas Asks Supreme Court to Let It Keep Denying Care to Pregnant Women

The state of Texas is asking the Supreme Court to allow it to continue denying emergency medical care to pregnant women, pretty please. The request, which the justices will consider at conference on Monday, September 30, comes on the heels of a new report that shows the state’s maternal mortality rate has spiked dramatically since … Read more

Maternity care deserts – increasing in number

Millions of US women don’t have access to maternity care, report warns More than a third of US counties do not have a single medical birthing facility or the services of an obstetric clinician, causing health advocates to warn about the dangers of “maternity care deserts”, a new report says. Read more at The Guardian … Read more

State abortion bans are forcing doctors to provide substandard care – new study

“One question that we had was: were the changes that we were seeing initially related to the initial shock of the Dobbs decisions and the laws that then went into effect? Would clinical protocols kind of adjust and healthcare providers would figure out how to provide high-quality care? Would these poor-quality cases disappear?” said Dr … Read more

Republicans want to steal reproductive freedom. Black women will suffer most | Opinion

According to US census projections, people of color are on par to be the majority by the middle of the century. With this imminent reality, the focus on controlling our fertility and denying us bodily autonomy is the age-old strategy of authoritarian, democracy-denying regimes. And to have a conservative-leaning supreme court that has proved that … Read more

States with strictest abortion laws offer the least support for women and families

“States with the most severe abortion restrictions have the least public infrastructure to support families,” said Dr. Nigel Madden, a maternal-fetal medicine physician at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, who led the study published Wednesday in the American Journal of Public Health. Read more at NBC News  

Some OB-GYNs aren’t getting abortion training, report finds, while pregnancy complications are on the rise

The report highlights several worrisome effects of abortion restrictions instituted after Roe v. Wade was overturned, including fewer applicants to OB-GYN residency programs in states that restrict abortion, practicing OB-GYNs moving out of these states and new doctors being left unprepared to treat pregnant patients in life-threatening scenarios. Read more at NBC News  

Abortion bans are also terrible for babies

A team of researchers at Johns Hopkins University has spent the two-and-a-half years since SB8 took effect crunching data on infant deaths in Texas and other states, then re-crunching it to confirm their results. They found that as women whose access to abortion was drastically curtailed by SB8 began to give birth in 2022, those … Read more