NBC News
The number of women in Texas who died while pregnant, during childbirth or shortly after delivery soared after the state’s 2021 ban on the abortion procedure, far outpacing a slower rise in maternal mortality nationwide, according to a new investigation of federal public health data.
From 2019 to 2022, the maternal mortality case rate in Texas increased by 56%, compared to just 11% nationally during the same time period, according to an analysis by the Gender Equity Policy Institute (GEPI). The nonprofit research group tracked publicly available reports from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and shared the analysis exclusively with NBC News.
“There is only one explanation for this striking difference in maternal mortality,” said Nancy L. Cohen, president of GEPI. “All research points to the Texas abortion ban as the primary driver of this alarming increase.”
“Texas, I fear, is a harbinger of what is to come in other states,” he added.
The effect of the law
The Texas Legislature banned abortion care starting at five weeks of pregnancy in September 2021, nearly a year before the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the ban. Roe vs. Wade -the case that protected the federal right to abortion- in June 2022.
At the time, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, praised the bill as a measure that “guarantees the life of every unborn child.”
Texas law now prohibits all abortions except to save the life of the mother.
The passage of Texas Senate Bill 8 gave GEPI researchers the opportunity to take a first look at how the near-total ban on abortion—including in cases where the mother’s life was at risk—affected the health and safety of pregnant women.
Cohen’s team found that SB 8’s effect was swift and dramatic. Within a year, maternal mortality increased across all racial groups studied. Among Hispanic women, the rate of women dying during pregnancy, childbirth or shortly after increased from 14.5% in 2019 to 18.9% in 2022. Rates among white women nearly doubled — from 20% to 39.1%. And Black women, who are historically more likely to die during pregnancy, childbirth or shortly after, saw their rates jump from 31.6% to 43.6%.
While maternal mortality has soared overall during the pandemic, women who died while pregnant or in childbirth have steadily increased in Texas following the state’s abortion ban, according to GEPI.
“If women are denied abortion, more women will become pregnant and more women will be forced to carry pregnancies to term,” Cohen said.
Beyond the immediate dangers of pregnancy and childbirth, there is growing evidence that women living in states with strict abortion laws, like Texas, are much more likely to lack prenatal care and much less likely to find an appointment with an obstetrician-gynecologist.
Doctors say the feeling among expectant mothers is one of fear.
“Fear is something I had never seen in my practice before Senate Bill 8,” said Dr. Leah Tatum, an obstetrician-gynecologist in Austin, Texas. Tatum, who was not involved in the GEPI study, said requests for sterilization among her patients doubled after the state abortion ban.
In other words, women would rather lose the possibility of having children than the possibility of becoming pregnant after the law.
“They treated me like a criminal. I didn’t have the dignity I deserved to say goodbye to my son.”
Kaitlyn Kash, 37 years old, from Austin, Texas
“Patients feel backed into a corner,” Tatum said. “If they already knew they didn’t want to go through with the pregnancy, now they’re terrified.”
Tatum said she is seeing many women in their 30s and 40s who, while they would like to have a child, are concerned about not having the option to terminate the pregnancy if it turns out the baby won’t be born healthy. “What if I end up with a genetically abnormal fetus?” Tatum says her patients have asked her. They worry that their options are limited.
Treated like a criminal
That unthinkable tragedy befell Kaitlyn Kash, 37, of Austin, Texas. Kash had a textbook pregnancy with her first child, a healthy boy, born in 2018.
“It had been so easy the first time,” she said. “Never in my wildest dreams did I think we would make the trip we did.”
When she became pregnant again, it wasn’t until Kash’s second trimester, at 13 weeks, that she and her husband, Cory, discovered their fetus had severe skeletal dysplasia, a rare genetic disorder that affects the growth of bones and cartilage. The baby was highly unlikely to survive.
“We were told that her bones would break in the womb and that she would suffocate at birth,” Kash said. “We were waiting for our doctor to tell us how we were going to care for our baby, how we were going to end her pain.”
It was October 2021, just a month after Texas passed its abortion law.
“We were told to get a second opinion, but to make sure it was outside of Texas,” he explains.
At 15 weeks, Kash had to travel to Kansas to terminate her pregnancy. Outside the clinic, protesters harassed the heartbroken mother.
“They treated me like a criminal,” she said. “I didn’t have the dignity I deserved to say goodbye to my son.”
“It’s just another example of how heartbreaking it is to practice in the state of Texas,” Tatum said. “These patients are crying out for help. The state of Texas has failed women.”