Committee members discovered longtime omission this year

While the committee receives information about almost every death during or 12 months after a pregnancy in Texas – including pregnancy-unrelated deaths like those of pregnant women in certain car crashes – cases involving deaths from self-managed abortions have not come before the task force.

It’s unclear how many such cases the committee has unknowingly skipped since 2014. CDC data directly from death certificates shows at least 20 deaths in Texas that were coded as abortion-related from 2014 to 2020. Researchers predicted an increase in these kinds of deaths due to abortion bans. A 2021 study estimated a blanket ban of abortion would lead to 21% more pregnancy-related deaths overall in the U.S., noting that their projection was a low estimate because it didn’t include potential deaths caused by unsafe, self-managed abortions.

  • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    48·
    8 months ago

    cases involving deaths from self-managed abortions have not come before the task force.

    Because of course not. If you don’t count them, they don’t exist! I’m so tired of living in a world where numbers are fudged like this constantly to make things look better than they are. It’s especially galling when it’s something like this.

    Anyway, nothing to see here, folks, just Texas pretending this, the worst class of pregnancy death you can imagine, as something that functionally doesn’t exist.

  • Mouselemming@sh.itjust.works
    37·
    8 months ago

    Just gonna mention that “unsafe self-managed abortions” become a lot more unsafe when a woman whose induced miscarriage has complications can’t get the correct medical response from a hospital until her life is in sufficient danger for Legal to sign off on it.

    Same for women whose miscarriage was induced by God rather than medication.

    Note: there’s no medical test for which is which, if the woman doesn’t tell them. If it were me, I wouldn’t.