Infant deaths increased significantly after U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade | The Montana Independent
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The toes of a baby peek out of a blanket at a hospital in McAllen, Texas. On Wednesday, Nov. 1, 2023, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported the increase of U.S. infant mortality rate to 3% in 2022 — a rare increase in a death statistic that has been generally been falling for decades. (AP Photo/Eric Gay, File)

In the year and a half after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in June 2022 in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, overturning Roe v. Wade and a constitutional right to abortion, there was a significant rise in infant mortality in the United States, a new study has found. 

Published on Oct. 21 in the journal JAMA Pediatrics, the data concludes that infant mortality rates were up by 7% in three of the first 18 months examined after the Dobbs decision — October 2022, March 2023, and April 2023 — an average of 247 more infant deaths. Eighty percent of those deaths can be attributed to congenital anomalies, the report says. 

The study shows that from 2018 to 2023, the national average monthly rate of infant mortality overall was about 5.6 deaths per 1,000 live births, and infant mortality with congenital anomalies averaged 1.3 deaths per 1,000 live births per month. After Dobbs, the study shows, mortality rates increased by 7%, and infant deaths with congenital anomalies rose by 10%. 

Congenital abnormalities or birth defects are those anomalies that occur before or at birth. According to the World Health Organization, 6% of all infants born worldwide are born with a congenital disorder that can result in death. 

“It could be that these are pregnancies that are now being carried to term with the consequence being the fetus proceeding through the entire course of pregnancy, despite being incompatible with life,” said Dr. Parvati Singh, an assistant professor of epidemiology at Ohio State University’s College of Public Health and the lead author of the study. 

Singh said there were several factors contributing to an increase in the number of infant deaths linked to fetal abnormalities. She said studies found that after the Dobbs decision, people were so confused that they thought accessing general prenatal care and maternal care was illegal. 

“We also have documented, peer-reviewed studies showing that physicians, health care providers, reproductive care providers, moved away from states that were heavily restrictive to more protective states,” Singh said. “What that does is it creates maternal care deserts, reproductive care deserts. Because now those places where providers moved away from don’t have the expertise required and the skill required, the medical care required for populations that are left behind. So all these factors together may underlie our results.”

Singh said that the new study, co-authored by Maria Gallo, an epidemiologist and associate dean at the College of Public Health, echoed the results of a similar study published in June that found infant deaths in Texas rose by nearly 13% after a six-week state abortion ban with no exceptions for cases of fetal anomalies went into effect in September 2021. 

“When we saw that paper, and especially the pronounced increase that they reported in infant mortality with congenital anomalies, is when we got the idea to look at whether something like this could have happened nationally after Dobbs,” Singh said. 

Singh said that when it comes to formulating laws and policies related to the public’s health care, “population-level health consequences, extreme health consequences, should be considered.”

“My takeaway is that these are potentially unintended consequences of these kinds of abortion restrictions, but they take a human toll,” she said, adding that the researchers’ findings are national preliminary findings that don’t take into account variations by state, race, ethnicity, gender identity and socioeconomic status. 

“What this could represent is basically a much bigger underlying population proportion of morbidity, of health conditions,” Singh said. “[Having] to deal with extra expenditures, so many other things, just a mental health toll of going through this, right? That should be considered going forward.”

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