New data purports to show how pro-life laws affect U.S. fertility rates and maternal mortality – but who can you believe?

The following is an excerpt from The Kristan Hawkins Show. Subscribe to The Kristan Hawkins Show HERE and opt-in to Kristan’s daily text update by texting “KRISTAN” to 53445 so you never miss breaking pro-life news!  

We’re nearly three years out from the Dobbs decision, which finally reversed Roe v. Wade after half a century. This restored the right of states to protect their own children from abortion violence.  

As a result, about half of America now has laws protecting babies in states across the country.  

When the decision happened, there was tons of unchecked fear-mongering happening in the pro-abortion media. And actually, the fear-mongering started earlier, when states started to make real progress toward state-level protections in the lead-up to Dobbs.  

The general feeling from the establishment media was that everything was going to be absolutely awful for Americans as a result of states getting their authority back.  

We at Students for Life and across the pro-life movement were saying that these claims were absolutely unsubstantiated the whole time.  

But it takes years for data to catch up and prove us right. We are just now starting to have the data to say “I told you so.”   

Two new studies both purport to show the effects of Dobbs over the past few years. But only one of them has reliable data. And that’s the report showing an increase in births since Dobbs. 

This comes from an analysis reported by Newsweek that looked at birth certificate and U.S. Census Bureau data through 2023 to assess changes in fertility rates in states with pro-life protections.

The analysis found that fertility rates are not declining as rapidly in states that protect children from abortion.  

That’s good news, because across the world, people are simply not having enough kids to keep their societies in existence. Plus, kids are just great. We recently did a segment on the Kristan Hawkins Show on why motherhood makes women happy. All in all, more births and more humans is a good thing.  

But right now, U.S. births are way below replacement rate. That means that there are not enough babies being born to replace the generation before them. In terms of numbers, “replacement” rate means that each woman would have an average of 2.1 kids – enough to replace herself and her partner.  

The U.S. fertility rate is currently around 1.6. In 1960, it was about 3.5, so this is a decline that happened pretty rapidly across the world. But the new data doesn’t suggest pro-life states are surpassing replacement rates again– it just shows that fertility rates are not dropping as quickly there.  

One researcher summarized it like this to Newsweek: “Births are not necessarily rising in states that banned abortion, but they are falling less slowly..” 

Did you catch where I said this data came from? Birth certificates. All births are tracked in the U.S. Birth certificate data doesn’t lie. You know what does? Abortion data. And maternal mortality data. 

And that brings us to our next study. The bogus one.  It comes from the “Gender Equity Policy Institute”…  if those aren’t some buzzwords that scream credibility!

Anyway, they’re claiming that maternal mortality rates are rising in states with pro-life protections. Their analysis purports that “pregnancy-related deaths” are up in pro-life states and down in pro-abortion states. And of course, they immediately jump to blaming pro-life laws for these findings.  

But not so fast.  

Before you take any “data” abortion activists give you that seems to show pro-life laws harm women, you need to ask some serious questions about how they collected the data and how they defined their terms. 

Here are a few of the problems this analysis fails to flag for readers:  

1. The U.S. has no national reporting law for maternal mortality (or abortion). Reporting processes and requirements vary by state. Much of the data is self-reported by states, leading to inconsistencies and making national comparisons unreliable.  

2. Not even the definition of “maternal death” is clear. If you took this report at face value, you’d think a lack of abortions was causing maternal mortality to go up. But there is literally no way to draw that conclusion from the data because there are no consistent reporting requirements to analyze.   

3. A new national study analyzing CDC data from 2005 to 2022 found violence is the leading cause of death during pregnancy with homicide accounting for 61% of violent maternal deaths & suicide accounting for 39%.  Over 55% of these deaths involved firearms. 

Due to a lack of consistent reporting requirements and review processes, there is no way to know how many of these non-medical-related deaths are being incorrectly included in the maternal death data. 

In fact, the problem is so bad that a report in the medical journal Birth said [emphasis added]: 

The problems in reporting of pregnancy status are compounded by United States coding rules that code every death with the pregnancy or postpartum checkbox checked to maternal causes, regardless of what is written in the cause-of-death section…

These types of cases are often coded to nonspecific causes of death… which provide little or no information as to what the true cause of death is… this overreliance on the pregnancy checkbox leads to seriously flawed United States maternal mortality data. As a result of these data problems, there is currently no clear picture available of United States’ maternal mortality levels and trends. This lack of information has a clear influence on related data systems, and on the ability of the United States to prevent these tragic deaths.

So excuse me if I am smelling BS when someone tells me that increases in maternal mortality are tied to pro-life, anti-violence laws. Let’s be clear: The abortion industry is in no position to be authorities on maternal mortality. 

It is the abortion activists who will not join us in calling for a national abortion reporting law to get clean data on how many abortions are actually happening, where, by what methods, and how this is impacting women’s health.  

In fact, it was the abortion lobby that pressured the FDA to STOP requiring reporting of adverse events from the use of the abortion pill. This is a drug that has devastating consequences for women who take it, and abortion activists don’t even want that data collected.  

It is the pro-life movement that works every day to save lives and promote non-violence. We have a lot more credibility to be sounding the alarm on maternal deaths than abortion activists do.  

And it is difficult to craft meaningful health policies that would reduce health-related maternal deaths when the data and definitions we are analyzing are so muddy and there seems to be little motivation to improve and nationalize reporting standards.  

It’s time to stop prioritizing the abortion narrative above actual women’s health. 

Kristan Hawkins is the President of Students for Life of America and Students for Life Action. Subscribe to The Kristan Hawkins Show HERE.

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