Study: Infant deaths rose 7% after Dobbs decision
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Key takeaways:
- Researchers used pre-Dobbs data to predict infant mortality rates in the months after the decision.
- Infant mortality was higher than expected in October 2022, March 2023 and April 2023.
Infant mortality rose 7%, and infant deaths with congenital anomalies increased 10% in the year following the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson decision, which overturned Roe v. Wade, according to research published in JAMA Pediatrics.
The Dobbs decision has caused a cascade of effects since June 2022. Online pharmacies saw a spike in medication abortion requests, and physicians are dealing with impacts to their professional lives and emotional well-being. In Texas, infant deaths rose 13% after the state banned abortion in 2021.
“We had hypothesized an increase in infant mortality based on prior work, [but] we were skeptical about seeing immediate increases within 12 months post-Dobbs at the national level,” Parvati Singh, PhD, MPA, assistant professor of epidemiology at The Ohio State University College of Public Health, told Healio.
“The consistency of the results across post-Dobbs changes in overall infant mortality rates and infant mortality with congenital anomalies was reassuring to us, because if those two outcomes had yielded different results, we would not have been convinced what we are seeing is real,” Sing said.
Singh and Maria Gallo, PhD, associate dean of research and professor of epidemiology at The Ohio State University College of Public Health, gathered data from the CDC about live births and infant deaths that occurred between 2018 and 2023. They used pre-Dobbs data to predict infant mortality trends after June 2022 and compared them with real-life outcomes.
Overall, there were 5.6 deaths per 1,000 live births from 2018 through 2023 and 1.3 deaths of infants with congenital anomalies per 1,000 live births.
Compared with predicted trends, the researchers found that overall infant mortality was higher in October 2022, March 2023 and April 2023, and infant mortality with congenital anomalies was higher in September and October 2022, as well as February through June 2023.
“We did not observe negative residual outliers for either outcome after Dobbs,” Singh and Gallo wrote.
There was a 7% increase in infant deaths (0.38 per 1,000 live births; 95% CI, 0.09-0.67) after Dobbs, the study showed. Deaths among infants with congenital anomalies rose 10% (0.13 per 1,000 live births; 95% CI, 0.09-0.17) after June 2022.
Among the study’s limitations, the researchers noted the use provisional data for 2023 for their analysis.
“Future research may examine state-level changes in birth outcomes post-Dobbs and consequent abortion restrictions, as well as include assessment of morbidity parameters — infant health, maternal health — cost to health care systems, psychiatric conditions among reproductive aged women and potential impact of Dobbs and abortion restrictions on intimate partner violence, social support systems and reproductive health care access among vulnerable populations,” Singh said.
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