After the US overturned Roe v Wade, permanent contraception surged among young adults living in states likely to ban abortion, new research found. Compared to May 2022, August 2022 saw 95% more vasectomies and 70% more tubal sterilizations performed on people between the ages of 19 and 26.

[u/mvea]

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/06/permanent-contraception-abortion-roe-v-wade

[u/[deleted]]

Can't blame them. Some states will literally let you die if you have pregnancy complications. Even if I wanted a kid, I wouldn't put myself at that level of risk.

[u/DemiserofD → u/[deleted]]

I've seen this mentioned, but does anyone have statistics on the numbers involved? It'd be nice to have a source to cite. How many women have died as a result of these laws?

[u/piedpipr → u/DemiserofD]

Mothers living in a state that banned abortion were up to 3x as likely to die during pregnancy, childbirth, or soon after giving birth.

While this is partly due to liberal states improving women's health programs over the decades (vs conservative states often reproductive health systems are stagnant or worsening), part of it is clearly due to abortion bans. Texas for example, 56% increase in maternal mortality after the abortion ban.

I recommend reading the report for the specific numbers and figures you are seeking.

[u/DemiserofD → u/piedpipr]

I would hesitate to use those numbers decisively, as they seem to largely be showing a wave of covid that was active at the time. The report does mention this, but not as clearly as it should.

I'm still quite confused on what the impact is, because I've read that the current maternal mortality rate is something like 28, but in 2014 it was 38! So did it drop to like 20 from 2014 to 2020, then spike to 28 in 2022? These figures feel almost random, other than the fact that texas has consistently had higher rates than average. But not THAT much higher, I also saw a figure claiming they were 27th out of 40(?).

[u/piedpipr → u/DemiserofD]

And Our World In Data has an article about futher back statistics and how the change in measurement is reflected. https://ourworldindata.org/rise-us-maternal-mortality-rates-measurement

[u/DemiserofD → u/piedpipr]

Does that not only further call the original study you posted into question? Texas, after all, was one of the centers of mask and vaccine reluctance in the US. If a significant portion of maternal deaths were actually the result of covid, but were incorrectly misattributed to maternal mortality, that calls the validity of the entire thing into question, as all the states were abortion limitations have been put into place are also places where covid was treated the least seriously.

I'd be inclined to wait a few more years to get a better idea of where things stabilize, especially given the chaotic effects of Covid during the same timeframe.

[u/piedpipr → u/DemiserofD]

Any death during pregancy is maternal mortality, so theres no such thing as "incorrectly misattributed". Read the whole thing, its in there, I'm not going to summarize for you

[u/DemiserofD → u/piedpipr]

My point being, you are attempting to attribute them to the increased abortion restrictions, but it seems more reasonable, given the pandemic, that we are instead seeing the effects of a wave of covid.

If you've got a bunch of people dying of covid at the same time, it would be an incorrect misattribution to credit those to the new abortion limitations.

How would you separate those out, and identify what the spike would have been had Covid not been occurring simultaneously?

[u/piedpipr → u/DemiserofD]

Good question. The first link compares state with/without bans and then from there find correlation to covid deaths/infections.

Also look at the NVSS monthly chart that divides maternal mortality by age: 40+ increases highly with covid, 25-39 increase very slightly with covid, and under 25 is no change. This makes sense because covid kills mostly older people. Under 25 mortality is flat until fall 2021 when SB 8 took effect and nearly doubles in 2022. You'd have to look at Texas specifically, maternal deaths by month and by age, to see when those younger mothers died and also you can find cause of death too.

If I were you, I'd go to that NVSS link and scroll down to the citations and look up the contact email for the scientists. I'm sure at least one will have time for questions.

[u/DemiserofD → u/piedpipr]

That's a fantastic resource, thank you.

Looking at that graph, it does seem likely that the ~50% number is profoundly overstated, however. While the younger demographics did see smaller increases, they did still see fairly significant percentage increases. From 2021 to the peak of the pandemic in 2022, under 25 saw a spike from 15.5 to 21.4, a 38% increase. The older demographics saw a MUCH larger overall increase, including percentage-wise, spiking from around 80 to 140, a 70% increase!

Averaging them all seems like it could fairly easily account for the vast majority of the increase.

I could send them an email if I were truly curious, but it seems like they'd probably advise just waiting a few years and seeing how things play out. After all, while we could make any number of models to account for covid, why bother if you don't have to?

Thanks for the help, especially with finding the charts!