r/science • u/mvea Professor | Medicine • Jan 06 '25

Health 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.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/06/permanent-contraception-abortion-roe-v-wade
22.3k Upvotes

95% Upvoted

1.1k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

2

u/DemiserofD Jan 07 '25

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!

1

u/piedpipr Jan 07 '25

Well, you should see the usa covid deaths by age category over time. The biggest peak death was winter 2020/2021, and while there multiple smaller waves, including the aftermath of abortion bans, the covid deaths for younger people did not increase in particular for that 2022 covid wave. Thus I do not see how covid is the reason why younger mothers died more in 2022.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm

1

u/DemiserofD Jan 07 '25

Bear in mind, Trump stopped recording covid deaths to keep the numbers down after a point. Probably better to use general mortality to get a more accurate estimate.

1

u/piedpipr Jan 07 '25

Incorrect. Testing for infection was underreported in a few states. Deaths are always reported. There is always a medical examiner/physican and a death certificate.