Infant mortality and births increased in the majority of states that had abortion bans in the year after the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 decision overturning Roe v. Wade, according to two new studies.
The studies, which were published in the Journal of the American Medical Association on Thursday, indicate that these impacts can be especially felt by people with socioeconomic disadvantages. Researchers said that the results “suggest that abortion bans may exacerbate racial disparities and disproportionately affect communities in southern states, where more than half of the U.S. Black population resides and infant mortality was already high.”
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The investigators analyzed data from birth and death certificates, as well as the U.S. Census Bureau, for all 50 states and Washington, D.C. from January 2012 through December 2023 to compare data from previous years and the 18 months after the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. One of the studies estimated that, overall, infant mortality was 5.6% higher than expected in states that enacted near-total abortion bans or bans after six weeks of pregnancy, resulting in about 478 more infant deaths than expected based on data from previous years. The other study estimated that, overall, the birth rate in those states was 1.7% higher than expected, amounting to about 22,000 more births than expected based on previous years’ data.
Fourteen states had enacted near-total or six-week abortion bans during the window that the researchers studied. As of mid-February 2025, 16 states have implemented such bans.
Researchers acknowledged that Texas had an “outsized influence” on the overall findings, which they attributed partly to the state’s large population, greater distances to travel to get an abortion compared with other states that had bans at the time, and the fact that Texas had enacted a ban on abortions after six weeks of pregnancy before the other states did (about nine months before the Dobbs ruling, in September 2021).
The authors also found that increases in infant mortality were larger among groups that already had higher than average infant mortality rates, such as Black infants and those living in southern states. For Black infants in states with abortion bans, mortality was 11% higher than would have been expected if there hadn’t been abortion bans, according to one of the studies.
Alyssa Bilinski, a professor at Brown University School of Public Health, was not involved in the studies but wrote an editorial accompanying them, saying that the findings highlight “the need for ongoing, comprehensive research to fully understand” the effects of abortion restrictions, and suggested improving access to Medicaid, parental leave, and affordable child care as ways to help support pregnant people and infants.
“There should be no partisan divide over the idea that all children and families deserve the opportunity to thrive,” Bilinski wrote in the editorial. “Even amidst heated national abortion debates, there remains much room for agreement: ensuring every child has the opportunity to thrive is a shared objective that transcends partisan lines, and thoughtful, family-oriented policy can both help to address the harms raised in these studies and foster a healthier and more equitable society for all.”