Study Finds Rise in Texas Births After Abortion Law. But Questions Remain.
Researchers watching the new abortion bans around the country have expected a resultant rise in births, but perhaps not one so large.
“It looks like they have demonstrated that births increased more in Texas than we would have expected,” said Caitlin Myers, a professor of economics at Middlebury College who studies abortion but did not participate in the study. “The inference I’m less comfortable making at this point is that all of those excess births are because of S.B. 8. Some of it may be, but I don’t think all of it will be. It’s just too high.”
The authors of the study, which was published as a two-page research letter in the Journal of the American Medical Association, also stopped short of attributing their estimated increase in births solely to the unusual law, which allows for civil lawsuits against those who aid abortions after the onset of fetal cardiac activity, usually around six weeks. The results at least suggested that “not everyone who might have received an abortion in the absence of S.B. 8 was able to obtain one,” they wrote.
Still, the authors were confident in their methods and results.
“This pattern was unique to Texas,” said Alison Gemmill, a professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and one of the researchers on the study. She said the team looked at each of the other 49 states and Washington, D.C., but found no evidence of differences from expected birth counts. If there were other explanations for the increase, she added, they would have to be unique to Texas and to the time after the S.B. 8 abortion law went into effect.
Quantifying the effect of abortion bans has been difficult for researchers because of a lag in obtaining detailed data about births.
Source: The New York Times
