After Dobbs, Maternal Mortality Has Dropped to Its Lowest Degree Since Roe
After the Dobbs decision was leaked on May 5, 2022, many media outlets predicted that the maternal mortality rate (MMR) would rise. More women, they said, would die in childbirth if abortion weren’t available.
For example, an article in the Washington Post said “researchers have estimated that maternal deaths could increase by up to 25 to 30 percent.”
Pro-choice authors Rebecca Little and Colleen Long wrote:
[M]aternal mortality rates are alarmingly high, and they are expected to rise even more in the aftermath of the Supreme Court decision to reverse abortion protections.1
Despite pro-abortion rhetoric to the contrary, the opposite has happened. Maternal mortality has been falling ever since Dobbs.
The MMR represents the number of women who die from pregnancy-related causes per 1000 live births. That number was 20.1 in 2019. It rose to 23.8 in 2020
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Little and Long wrote in 2024, “America is also the only developed nation where maternal mortality rates are actually increasing…”2
The maternal mortality rate since Dobbs
They were wrong. MMR rates in the US indeed increased between 2015 and 2021. In 2021, the US maternal mortality rate had gone all the way up to 32.9. During this time, abortion was legal in every state.
But from 2021 to 2023, the maternal mortality rate dropped dramatically.
Dobbs took effect on June 24, 2022. In 2022, the MMR fell to 22.3 deaths per 100,000 live births. By the end of 2023, the first full year after Dobbs, it had gone all the way down to 18.6. It is now comparable to pre-Roe levels, which in 1971-1972 were 18.8.3
The overturning of Roe may not be the reason the MMR has gone down. That may have more to do with the subsiding of the COVID-19 epidemic. However, the fact that it has now dropped to a lower rate than before the epidemic (and is continuing to decline) suggests that there may be more to the story.
MMR after abortion is banned
Further evidence that restricting abortion may actually be related to lower maternal mortality rates comes from other countries. The pattern of the MMR going down after abortion is banned is actually quite common.
It happened in Chile. From 1931 to 1988, abortion was legal in Chile only to save the life of the mother. In 1989, it was banned in all cases.
If abortion were necessary to save pregnant peoples’ lives, we would expect the MMR to skyrocket. But that is not what happened. In 1980, when abortion was legal to save a woman’s life, Chile’s MMR was 70. By 2008 (when abortion was banned in all cases), the MMR had fallen to only 21.9.
Poland banned abortion in almost all cases in 1989. Since then, the MMR has gone from 17 to 2.
El Salvador banned abortion in 1998. Before 1998, it had an MMR of 155 per 100,000 live births. Today, its MMR is 46– less than a third of what it was with legal abortion.
Nicaragua banned abortion in 2006. In 2005, its MMR was 190.4 In 2017, it was 98.
MMR after abortion is legalized
We’ve also seen the opposite: a rise in the MMR when abortion is legalized or expanded.
Guyana had a maternal mortality rate of 216 when abortion was illegal. Abortion was legalized there in 1995. By 2015, Guyana’s MMR had risen to 229 per 100,000.3
In South Africa, abortion was legal only in cases of sexual assault, fetal disability, or health risks to the mother. But in 1996, the law was changed to allow abortion for any reason. Shortly thereafter, the MMR, which had been dropping for decades, began to rise.
In 1990, maternal mortality was 108, but by 2015 it was up to 138 — a rise of almost 30%.”5 In 2019, it was 113 — still higher than before legalized abortion.
Countries with vs. without legal abortion
Finally, we see cases where the MMR is lower in countries without legal abortion than in comparably wealthy countries without it.
Ireland, before legalizing abortion in 2018, had an MMR of 5, far lower than the U.S., and lower than that of the UK at the time (7) with legal abortion.
Malta had an MMR of 6 in 2017. At that time, abortion was illegal even to save the mother’s life. In the same year, in the US, with legal abortion in every state, the MMR rate was 19.
Hungary has an MMR of 12 (three times higher than Poland’s and twice as high as Malta’s). Ukraine had an MMR of 19 in 2017. The Russian Federation has an MMR of 11.2. Abortion is legal and common in these countries.
Mexico allows individual states to have their own abortion laws. A study in the British Medical Journal found that states with more restrictive laws had MMRs approximately 25% lower than those with more permissive laws.
Possible reasons for the statistics
All this data may be explained by factors unrelated to abortion. After all, numerous factors influence a country’s maternal mortality rate.
However, researchers Angela Lanfranchi, Ian Gentles, and Elizabeth Ring-Cassidy wrote:
The reality seems to be that countries that do not allow abortion are much more likely to make sustained efforts to improve the quality of care for pregnant women and mothers.
They offer better emergency obstetric care, transportation to emergency obstetric care, delivery by trained birth attendants, education for women, and better postnatal care for mothers and infants… In short, countries that do not offer abortion on request have a much better record of promoting maternal and infant health than countries that do.
Despite media stories and pro-abortion claims, women are not dying left and right due to pro-life laws. If they were, we would see the maternal mortality rate going up. Instead, we see it going down.
The CDC is not a pro-life source, but its statistics tell a pro-life story. Pro-life laws are not hurting women or endangering pregnant people.
Pro-abortion misinformation continues
Of course, these facts don’t stop pro-abortion activists from claiming that the maternal mortality rate is rising.
In her newsletter, Abortion Every Day, Jessica Valenti wrote that pro-life concern about abortion coercion is a “messaging tactic [that] makes it appear like they care about women—something they desperately need as the maternal death rate skyrockets.”
Pro-lifers should be aware of the actual statistics, so we can correct pro-abortion misinformation when we see it.
Notes
1. Rebecca Little and Colleen Long I’m Sorry for My Loss: An Urgent Examination of Reproductive Care in America (Naperville, Illinois: Sourcebooks, 2024) 185
2. Ibid., xxix
3. Cited in Thomas W Hilgers, MD The Fake and Deceptive Science Behind Roe v. Wade (New York: Beaufort Books, 2020) 30–31, from National Health Center for Health Statistics, 2004 Death Report, as reported in The Associated Press
4. Angela Lanfranchi, Ian Gentles, and Elizabeth Ring-Cassidy Complications: Abortion’s Impact on Women, Second Ed.: Revised and Updated (Toronto, Canada: The deVeber Institute for Bioethics and Social Research, 2018) 43
5. Ibid., 21–22
6. M Chopra, E Daviaud, R Pattinson, S Fonn, JE Lawn “Saving the Lives of South Africa’s Mothers, Babies, and Children: Can the Health System Deliver?” The Lancet August 2009; 374 (9692): 835–46
7. Angela Lanfranchi, Ian Gentles, and Elizabeth Ring-Cassidy Complications…, 6
LifeNews Note: Sarah Terzo covered the abortion issue for over 13 years as a professional journalist. In this capacity, she has written nearly a thousand articles about abortion and read over 850 books on the topic. She has been researching and writing about abortion since attending The College of New Jersey (class of 1997) where she minored in Women’s Studies. This article originally appeared on Sarah Terzo’s Substack. You can read more of her articles here.