Thread by @jburnmurdoch

NEW: deep dive into the grim & highly unequal impacts of a US abortion ban ft.com/content/ebf64d…

We begin with a damning chart:

US women die from pregnancy-related causes at far higher rates than their peers, and black US women die at rates often seen in developing countries

That statistic is an indictment of US maternal health care, and a clear example of how structural & implicit racism can cost lives.

What do I mean by that?

Structural: the average black woman starts out with elevated health risks linked to a history of disadvantage.

Implicit: 2019 study found pregnant women of colour were disproportionately likely to be ignored or have their requests refused by medical staff …tive-health-journal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.11…

The result is that the act of carrying a child to birth in the US is three times as lethal for black women as for white women.

And this has very significant implications when we start thinking about restricting access to abortion.

Such has been the success of anti-abortion propaganda over the years, one might be forgiven for thinking that abortion is a more dangerous procedure than giving birth.

But one would be very wrong.

There were 861 pregnancy-related deaths in the US in 2020, for a rate of 24 per 100,000 births.

Over the past six years, there have been an average of 4 abortion-related deaths, for a rate of 0.41 per 100,000 legal abortions.

Abortion is roughly 60x safer than pregnancy & birth

So when you restrict abortion, you’re pushing women down a much more dangerous path, increasing their risk of serious harm.

As we’ve seen, this jump in risk is especially pronounced among black women, but this isn’t the only way in which they would bear the brunt of a repeal.

Black women are also the most likely to get an abortion, as are women in poverty.

So a ban disproportionately pushes these groups down that more dangerous path. And they have the fewest resources to find an alternative such as seeking treatment in another state.

It’s a grim one-two punch.

Enact a policy that disproportionately hits black women, and preside over a system in which the act of being denied an abortion is also more dangerous for black women.

The result, as demonstrated by @ajeanstevenson, is that a US abortion ban would increase the lifetime risk of a black woman dying from pregnancy-related causes by 33%, to 1 in 1,000 read.dukeupress.edu/demography/art…

Both the level and rate of increase are far higher than any other group.

And we’ve not even got onto the non-health impacts of a repeal yet.

The negative socio-economic impacts of forcing women into unwanted births are well-established, but this study, by @Dianagfoster & team, is particularly insightful jamanetwork.com/journals/jamap…

The study compared two groups of US women — those who were denied an abortion due to being just over the gestational limit and had an unintended birth, and those who received an abortion due to being just under the limit, but then had a planned birth in the next couple of years.

The findings were clear:

Women who had unplanned births driven by denial of abortion were more likely to fall into poverty, be left as a solo-parent, and struggle to bond with their child, compared to women who received an abortion and then had a planned birth at a later date.

All in all, the outlook is bleak.

As is almost invariably the case, when something bad happens in the US, it happens disproportionately to black people and those on low incomes.

The repeal of Roe vs Wade is no exception, though the harms will be felt by every woman.

Here’s my full column this week, on the US’s most shameful statistic ft.com/content/ebf64d…