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infant mortality
Post-Dobbs Infant Mortality Spike Shows 'We Must Restore Abortion Rights'
Rep. Pramila Jayapal called the findings "a direct result of Trump's right-wing Supreme Court and extreme MAGA abortion bans."
Oct 22, 2024
In yet another example of what's at stake in the November 5 elections, now just two weeks away, researchers revealed Monday that since the U.S. Supreme Court reversedRoe v. Wade in June 2022, babies have died at a higher rate across the country.
Responding to the findings on Tuesday, Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.)—who has publicly shared her own abortion care story—took aim at Republican nominee Donald Trump, who as president appointed three of the justices behind the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization ruling that unleashed a GOP attack on reproductive freedom nationwide.
"The U.S. has a higher infant mortality rate than before the Dobbs decision—a direct result of Trump’s right-wing Supreme Court and extreme MAGA abortion bans," Jayapal said on social media. "Another proof point that this was never about protecting life. We must restore abortion rights."
Research published in JAMA Pediatrics in June showed "increased infant mortality in Texas following passage of Senate Bill 8, banning abortion in early pregnancy," notes the new paper, published in the same journal. "The increase appeared pronounced among infants with congenital anomalies, potentially owing to frail fetuses more often being carried to term following the implementation of abortion restrictions."
"In the seven to 14 months after Roe v. Wade was overturned, we saw a 7% increase in infant mortality, and a 10% increase in those babies born with congenital anomalies."
Parvati Singh and Maria Gallo of Ohio State University decided to examine "whether national monthly trends in infant mortality exhibit similar patterns" following Dobbs. They found that "infant mortality was higher than expected, overall and among those with congenital anomalies, for several months after the Dobbs decision in the U.S."
Specifically, "in the seven to 14 months after Roe v. Wade was overturned, we saw a 7% increase in infant mortality, and a 10% increase in those babies born with congenital anomalies," said Singh, an assistant professor of epidemiology, in a statement.
More than 20 states currently have total abortion bans or limit care at various points during the first 18 weeks of pregnancy. Over the past two years, stories of pregnant people who have been denied emergency care or even died due to state restrictions have mounted.
Though some experts warned of such consequences back in 2022, Gallo said that "I'm not sure that people expected infant mortality rates to increase following Dobbs. It's not necessarily what people were thinking about. But when you restrict access to healthcare it can cause a broader impact on public health than can be foreseen."
"Will this continue past this time period? That's an open question," the epidemiology professor added. "It could be that, yes, it will because access is shut down in some states. But it also could be that eventually more state policymakers are seeing that this isn't what people in the state want and more will pass constitutional amendments to protect access."
Both the researchers behind this paper and the lead author of the Texas study, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health demographer and perinatal epidemiologist Alison Gemmill, pointed out that the infant mortality rates might have been even higher if the latest analysis focused on states where policies changed versus national trends.
"Prior to these abortion bans, people had the option to terminate if the fetus was found to have a severe congenital anomaly—we're talking about organs being outside of the body and other things that are very severe and not compatible with life," Gemmill told the Los Angeles Times. If patients in these positions are forced continue their pregnancies, she added, "those babies would die shortly after birth."
The Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, and her allies warn that a Trump victory in November could result in a federal ban on abortion as well as restrictions on birth control and fertility treatments.
Although the Republican has tried to deflect criticism by claiming he supports leaving such decisions to states, that approach threatens the lives and rights of people living in GOP-controlled states. Given that Trump is also a well-documented liar, critics say his public promises to leave it up to the states doesn't mean he wouldn't sign a federal abortion ban if a Republican-held Congress put one on his desk.
Trump recently said he will vote against a Florida ballot measure that would strike down the state's six-week ban and prevent similar pre-viability prohibitions.
"Because of Donald Trump, millions of women across our nation are living under Trump abortion bans and lack access to critical reproductive healthcare," Harris said last week.
"Because of Donald Trump, doctors, and nurses face potential jail time for taking care of their patients," she continued. "And because of Donald Trump, women are facing horrific consequences to their health and lives—even death. Donald Trump is the architect of this healthcare crisis. He is 'proud' of overturning Roe v. Wade and if given the chance, he will make the crisis even worse in all 50 states. We will not let that happen."
In addition to choosing the next president, U.S. voters—some of whom are already casting ballots—will pick which party controls each chamber of Congress. Last month, Harris, a former senator, endorsed eliminating the Senate filibuster to codify Roe.
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'Astonishing' Study Shows Infant Deaths Rise in US When Bat Populations Fall
Experts hailed the study as "groundbreaking" and "sobering" for the connections it draws between ecosystem and human health.
Sep 06, 2024
Bat die-offs in the U.S. led to increased use of insecticides, which in turn led to greater infant mortality, according to a "seminal" study published Thursday that shows the effects of biodiversity loss on human beings.
Eyal Frank, an environmental economist at the University of Chicago, authored the study, which was published by Science, a leading peer-reviewed journal.
Bats can eat thousands of insects per night and act as a natural pest control for farmers, so when a fungal disease began killing off bat populations in the U.S. after being introduced in 2006, farmers in affected counties used more insecticides, Frank found. Those same counties saw more infant deaths, which Frank linked to increased use of insecticide that is harmful to human health, especially for babies and fetuses.
The study was greeted by an outpouring of praise from unaffiliated scientists for its methodology and the important takeaways it offers.
"[Frank] uses simple statistical methods to the most cutting-edge techniques, and the takeaway is the same," Eli Fenichel, an environmental economist at Yale University, toldThe New York Times. "Fungal disease killed bats, bats stopped eating enough insects, farmers applied more pesticide to maximize profit and keep food plentiful and cheap, the extra pesticide use led to more babies dying. It is a sobering result."
Carmen Messerlian, an environmental epidemiologist at Harvard University, told the Times the study "seminal" and "groundbreaking."
The study shows the need for a broader understanding of human health that includes consideration of entire ecosystems, said Roel Vermeulen, an environmental epidemiologist at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. "It emphasizes the need to move from a human-centric health impact analysis, which only considers the direct effects of pollution on human health, to a planetary health impact assessment," he toldNew Scientist.
Reporter Benji Jones echoed that sentiment in Vox, calling Frank's findings "astonishing" and writing that such studies could help us fight chemical pollution by corporations.
"When the link between human and environmental health is overlooked, industries enabled by short-sighted policies can destroy wildlife habitats without a full understanding of what we lose in the process," Jones said. "This is precisely why studies like this are so critical: They reveal, in terms most people can relate to, how the ongoing destruction of biodiversity affects us all."
NEW: This is one of the more stunning (and sobering) studies I've covered in a while:
It found that a decline of bats in the U.S. had come at a deadly cost to human babieshttps://t.co/M82FXxBrtO
— Dino Grandoni (@dino_grandoni) September 5, 2024
Frank, who said he started the work after stumbling on an article about bat population loss while procrastinating, happened upon an excellent natural experiment. The spread of white-nose syndrome, the fungal disease, was well tracked on a county-by-county level, leaving him with high-quality data that is hard to find for researchers who study the intersection of human and animal life.
The benefits of biodiversity on humans, and the drawbacks to its loss, are normally very difficult to quantify.
"That's just quite rare—to get good, empirical, grounded estimates of how much value the species is providing," Charles Taylor, an environmental economist at Harvard Kennedy School, toldThe Guardian. "Putting actual numbers to it in a credible way is tough."
Taylor himself is the author of a somewhat similar study that showed that pesticide use and infant mortality rose during years in which cicadas appeared; the insects do so at 13-17 year intervals.
David Rosner, a historian based at Columbia University, said the new bat study joins a large body of evidence dating back to the 1960s that links pesticide use with negative human health outcomes. "We're dumping these synthetic materials into our environment, not knowing anything about what their impacts are going to be," he said. "It's not surprising—it's just kind of shocking that we discover it every year."
Frank's claim about the cause of increased infant mortality should be taken with some caution, said Vermeulen, the Dutch researcher. He said the loss of agricultural income caused by bat die-offs could be connected to the increased deaths in complex ways.
The exact causal mechanism isn't known, Frank told media outlets, but the data shows the rise of infant mortality didn't come from food contamination by insecticides—rather, it's more likely it came via the water supply or contact with the chemicals.
Frank's other research extends beyond pesticide use. He and another researcher recently estimated that hundreds of thousands of human beings have died in India due to the collapse of the country's vulture population, as rotting meat increased the spread of diseases such as rabies.
Frank is not the first to study the impacts of white-nose syndrome on humans. Other studies have shown a reduction in land rents in counties hit by the bat plague and documented the billions of dollars that farmers have lost as their natural pest control disappeared.
The syndrome attacks bats while they hibernate. It was first identified in New York in 2006 and has since spread to much of North America. It's believed to have been brought over from Europe. It doesn't affect all bat species, but it's killed more than 90% of three key species, and bats also face a myriad of other threats, including habitat loss, climate change, and the dangerous churn of wind turbines.
Frank's bracing study should be a call to arms, experts said.
"This study estimates just a few of the consequences we suffer from the disappearance of bats, and they are just one of the species we're losing," Felicia Keesing, a biologist at Bard College, told The Washington Post. "These results should motivate everyone, not just farmers and parents, to clamor for the protection and restoration of biodiversity."
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Under Texas GOP's Abortion Ban, Infant Deaths From Fetal Abnormalities Jumped 23%
"This is so cruel and pointless," said one advocate. "Texas and other 'pro-life' states force women to carry doomed pregnancies for months... only to watch their babies die."
Jun 25, 2024
By taking away from Texas residents the option of terminating a pregnancy in the case of a fetal abnormality when they passed Senate Bill 8 in 2021, Republican lawmakers in the state attained a "tragic" result, according to an analysis released Monday: The number of babies who died soon after birth from congenital conditions jumped by nearly 25% in just one year.
Overall, according to researchers at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, the state's abortion law, which bans the procedure after just six weeks of pregnancy with no exception for fetal abnormalities, led to a 13% rise in Texas' infant mortality rate from 2021-2022.
More than 200 families in the state experienced the loss of an infant shortly after birth as a result of the ban, estimated the study, which was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association Pediatrics on the second anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court's overturning of Roe v. Wade.
"Behind these numbers are people," Dr. Erika Werner, chair of obstetrics and gynecology at Tufts Medical Center, who was not involved in the research, told NBC News. "For each of these pregnancies, that's a pregnant person who had to stay pregnant for an additional 20 weeks, carrying a pregnancy that they knew likely wouldn't result in a live newborn baby."
The number of infants in Texas who died in their first month of life rose by more than 10%, according to the study.
During the period examined by the researchers, infant mortality rose by about 2% nationwide. While the number of babies who died of congenital abnormalities in Texas jumped by nearly 23%, that number decreased by about 2% across the country.
"This is pointing to a causal effect of the policy; we didn't see this increase in infant deaths in other states," lead author Alison Gemmill, assistant professor of population, family, and reproductive Health at the Bloomberg School of Public Health, told NBC News.
Nan Strauss, a senior policy analyst of maternal health at the National Partnership for Women & Families, agreed with Gemmill's conclusion, saying the study found "an ironclad link between the change in the law and the terrible outcomes that they're seeing for infants and families."
"The women and families have to suffer through an excruciating later part of pregnancy, knowing that their baby is likely to die in the first weeks of life," Strauss told NBC.
The people affected by S.B. 8 include Samantha Casiano, who joined a lawsuit filed by the Center for Reproductive Rights against the state's abortion ban. Casiano found out at 20 weeks pregnant that her baby had anencephaly and would not survive the condition. She was unable to travel out of state to get an abortion, and spent the last months of her pregnancy worrying "relentlessly about how she would afford a funeral for her daughter" while people "constantly" congratulated her. Her daughter died four hours after birth.
"Waking up every morning, knowing that your child is going to die and planning your child's funeral before your child's even here is insane, and it's unfair," Casiano toldNBC News on Monday. "There's just a lot of suffering there."
In the study published Monday, the research team analyzed death certificates in Texas and 28 other states from 2018-2022 to determine the impact of S.B. 8, building a model that calculated how many infant deaths would have occurred in Texas without the ban and comparing that number to the infant deaths that were recorded after the law was passed.
"Prior to this policy, if an anomaly was detected, people would have had the ability to legally terminate at least up to maybe about 20 weeks, or even maybe 22 weeks gestation," Gemmill toldThe Guardian. "Any infant death is tragic, but then layering on top of that, this pregnant person's situation where they know that they're carrying a fetus that is incompatible with life, whereas before, they maybe would have had the option to terminate."
Columnist Jill Filipovic said the study's findings were straightforward: "Women were forced by Texas law to have babies everyone knew would suffer and die."
"This is so cruel and pointless," said Filipovic. "Texas and other 'pro-life' states force women to carry doomed pregnancies for months, to field congratulations and questions about whether it's a boy or a girl, to go through the pain and risk of childbirth, only to watch their babies die."
Despite persistent claims by the Republican Party that abortion bans like S.B. 8 are "pro-life," said Healthcare Across Borders founder and executive director Jodi Jacobson, the study shows how the laws have already begun worsening infant mortality rates.
"We literally spent billions trying to address these very problems in low-income countries only to recreate them here," said Jacobson.
The study was released ahead of an expected ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of Idaho and Moyle, et al. v. United States, which centers on whether states can enforce bans that conflict with the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act. The law requires hospitals that accept Medicare to provide treatment to any patient with an emergency medical condition, including people facing pregnancy complications who need abortions.
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