Debunking The Media-Fueled Claim That Texas’ Pro-Life Law Caused A Rise In Infant Deaths
More Texas babies than ever in recent history are escaping pre-term murder after the state enacted a heartbeat law in 2021, but corporate media are using a new study that blames the lifesaving protections for a jump in infant mortality to vilify pro-life policies and promote Democrats’ extreme abortion agenda.
The data, published in JAMA Pediatrics this week, claims there was an 8.3 percent increase in infant deaths in the Lone Star State after the lifesaving law, which bars abortion beyond the presence of a fetal heartbeat except in certain cases, went into effect in September 2021.
The study and its authors seem to suggest that infants suffering from a congenital abnormality, which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention pins as the leading cause of baby deaths in the U.S., are better off being murdered in the womb than having a fighting chance to meet their parents face to face and survive with the help of medical intervention after birth.
“Some — but not all — of the increase we found was likely due to forced continuation of pregnancies with known lethal congenital anomalies,” one of the authors, Alison Gemmill, wrote on X.
The study itself had several problems including the lack of a statistically significant increase that its internal tables prove and an admitted failure to account for other contributing factors such as the state’s massive increase in births over the last three years, and conflating correlation with causation.
Even the groundwork for the study doesn’t quite add up. Johns Hopkins researchers said they investigated the exposure group starting in March 2022, when babies who were spared from in-utero murder because of Senate Bill 8 were full-term. In the article’s conclusion, however, researchers claimed “unexpected increases in infant and neonatal deaths” in the state occurred “between 2021 and 2022.”
Despite the questionable formation and framing of the study, outlets such as the Associated Press, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Bulwark, and Vanity Fair quickly latched onto the narrative that baby deaths in Texas rose dramatically “literally” because of its proactive pro-life stance.
While it’s true that more babies are dying outside of the womb than inside now that Texas has effectively outlawed abortion, there is no logic behind the widespread claim that protecting children from in-utero murder, not abortion laws, is the deadlier option.
You don’t have to be a genius to understand that babies who survive murder in-utero prior are, like every other human on the planet, more eligible to die after birth.
National infant mortality statistics do not account for infant death before birth. If they did, the data would show that thousands of little lives in the Lone Star State are saved from murder in the womb each month because of SB8.
To put that into perspective, post-birth baby deaths in Texas went from approximately 165 per month to 186 per month from 2021 to 2022. Demise in the womb, however, went from approximately 4,400 abortions per month before the state’s heartbeat law went into effect to five per month after.
Thanks to Texas’ heartbeat law, babies whose survivals were threatened by the possibility of abortion now have a chance to live, or at least die with dignity instead of by dismemberment.
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on X @jordanboydtx.
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