I have one daughter and three granddaughters. Two of the granddaughters are growing up in New York and one is growing up in Copenhagen, so none of my girls are in Texas, but of course Texas is part of the United States and if the state of Texas is sacrificing women on the altar of religious extremism and misogyny that means the United States is:
Pregnancy became far more dangerous in Texas after the state banned abortion in 2021, ProPublica found in a first-of-its-kind data analysis. The rate of sepsis shot up more than 50% for women hospitalized when they lost their pregnancies in the second trimester, ProPublica found. The surge in this life-threatening condition, caused by infection, was most pronounced for patients whose fetus may still have had a heartbeat when they arrived at the hospital.
The new reporting shows that, after the state banned abortion, dozens more pregnant and postpartum women died in Texas hospitals than had in pre-pandemic years, which ProPublica used as a baseline to avoid COVID-19-related distortions. As the maternal mortality rate dropped nationally, ProPublica found, it rose substantially in Texas
Health experts, specially equipped to study maternal deaths, sit on federal agencies and state-appointed review panels. But, as ProPublica previously reported, none of these bodies have systematically assessed the consequences of abortion bans.
So ProPublica set out to do so, first by investigating preventable deaths, and now by using data to take a broader view, looking at what happened in Texas hospitals after the state banned abortion, in particular as women faced miscarriages.
“It is kind of mindblowing that even before the bans researchers barely looked into complications of pregnancy loss in hospitals,” said perinatal epidemiologist Alison Gemmill, an expert on miscarriage at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
I’m not surprised at all that researchers “barely looked” into women dying in hospitals prior to this nonprofit newspaper doing so - this country doesn’t actually care whether women die of wholly preventable causes in hospitals. The US is no longer a great place for women on equality and opportunity- if I were advising young women I’d tell them to look to relocating to other liberal democracies for a better quality of life and government(s) that don’t hate women.
If you can spare it, subscribe to ProPublica. They are the only people doing this work.
