(LifeSiteNews) – The abortion lobby’s narrative that pro-life laws are harming legitimate women’s health services in pro-life states does not square with the actual evidence, according to a prominent pro-life researcher’s recent review of the narrative’s latest media offensive.
On July 18, left-wing health policy group the Commonwealth Fund released a scorecard claiming to expose “mounting disparities in women’s health and reproductive care across the United States” spurred by the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 overturn of Roe v. Wade, which by allowing states to decide their own abortion laws supposedly “significantly altered access to critical reproductive health care services.”
“The five lowest-ranked states for health system performance for women overall are Mississippi, Texas, Nevada, Oklahoma, and Arkansas,” the group announced, while “Massachusetts, Vermont, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New Hampshire are the highest-ranked states. States with abortion restrictions often have fewer maternity care providers. Arkansas, Oklahoma, Alabama, and Idaho had the fewest maternity care providers per 100,000 women of reproductive age, ranging from 52 to 56 providers.”
The report purported to expose pro-life states as faring worse in a wide range of metrics, including health insurance, syphilis rates, maternal deaths, and more, along with “deepening racial and ethnic gaps in health outcomes.”
Writing in National Review, however, Catholic University of America professor and Charlotte Lozier Institute scholar Michael New concludes that “there is much less here than meets the eye” for several reasons, not least of which being that most of the data Commonwealth relied on came from 2022, yet Roe was not overturned until June of that year, which was the earliest point at which any of the newly enforceable laws could have taken effect and begun impacting outcomes.
“The scorecard does not compare pre-Dobbs data to post-Dobbs data,” New continued. “All it shows is that some states with strong pro-life laws fare poorly on some public-health metrics. The problem is that many states with strong protections for the preborn are also states with above-average poverty rates. In general, states with high poverty rates also tend to have below-average public-health outcomes. Overall, poverty is a cause of poor public health, not pro-life laws.”
Finally, New noted that data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) actually indicates that maternal mortality decreased by 16 percent between 2022 and 2023, and that data from around the world associates pro-life protections with better health outcomes for mothers.
Nevertheless, the abortion lobby has had great success using false claims that pro-life laws are dangerous to stoke fear about the issue among the general public, most visibly in the area of state constitutional amendments enshrining “rights” to abortion immune from future legislation. Pro-lifers have either failed to enact pro-life amendments or stop pro-abortion ones in California, Kentucky, Michigan, Montana, Vermont, and Ohio, prompting much conversation among pro-lifers about the need to develop new strategies to protect life at the ballot box.
This year, there are six abortion-related ballot initiatives slated for the November elections, with as many as six more that could be approved for consideration. Fears over such battles has led the Donald Trump-led national Republican Party to formally retreat from its longtime commitment to federal protection for the preborn.
Fourteen states currently ban all or most abortions. But the abortion lobby is working feverishly to cancel out those deterrent effects by deregulated interstate distribution of abortion pills, legal protection and financial support of interstate abortion travel, constructing new abortion facilities near borders shared by pro-life and pro-abortion states, and making liberal states sanctuaries for those who want to evade or violate the laws of more pro-life neighbors, along with the aforementioned amendments.