Infant mortality has risen in states that enacted tighter abortion restrictions in the wake of the June 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health decision. This occurs for newborns – those less than a day old – as well as older infants – those 1 month to 1 year old.
In addition, states with new restrictions that include health exceptions, which permit an abortion to be performed to save the life of the mother or in the case of life-limiting fetal abnormality, experience a similar increase in infant deaths. These are the key takeaways of our team’s August 2025 study published in the American Journal of Public Health.
For our research, we drew data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to determine how many infants died in each state between 2018 and 2023.
We then looked at changes in the number of infant deaths before a state introduced a new abortion restriction versus after, contrasting those changes with states that had not implemented new restrictions. In economic parlance, we estimated the “difference in differences.”
On average, states with abortion restrictions enacted after Dobbs saw a 7.2% increase in infant deaths – an increase of roughly 30 deaths per year in children up to age 1. These deaths did not exclusively occur among newborns in their first day of life. Instead, much of the disparity was concentrated among infants between 1 month and 1 year old, who suffered a 9.3% increase in excess deaths.
We observed no significant change in the number of infant deaths when state legislatures included health exceptions for the mother or the fetus. In other words, our data showed that despite such exceptions, infant deaths increased at the same rate as states without the exceptions.
Why it matters
Three years after Roe was overturned, the abortion rights landscape in the U.S. is still contested terrain.
In effect, the Dobbs decision returned control of abortion regulation to the states. Since that time, legislators in more than 20 states have instituted abortion restrictions that would not have been permissible under the previous Roe v. Wade standard.
Still, other states have taken steps to protect access to the procedure, including Arizona, Colorado, Maryland, Missouri, Montana and New York.
Within this fragmented legal environment, we and others are working to rigorously examine public health outcomes so policymakers, legislators and voters can make informed decisions.
This examination did not start with us. For example, prior researchers found that infant deaths in Texas rose nearly 13% after the passage of Texas Senate Bill 8 in 2021. Our paper suggests that, unfortunately, the Texas study was not a fluke. The same pattern holds nationally in states that enacted abortion restrictions in the wake of Roe being overturned.
The lack of significant difference in the number of infant deaths in states where abortion restrictions have health exceptions also suggests that medical professionals may be unsure when they can lean on such exceptions when treating patients. And if health exceptions are going to have the desired effect, state legislatures will need to define what constitutes “serious risk” and “irreversible impairment,” as well as other broad terms that are included in such statutory language.
What still isn’t known
Although our study makes it clear that infant mortality has risen in abortion-restricting states, future research is needed to explain precisely how the restrictions contributed to these deaths.
Indeed, our paper finds that the rise in mortality was not solely due to perinatal or congenital issues and the time of birth. Increases also occurred in the catch-all category of “other causes” that may affect infants up to the second year of life. This murkiness deepens the mystery around how, exactly, abortion restrictions are putting infants at risk.
Further, due to data availability, we have little insight into how the patchwork of abortion laws is affecting people from different groups, such as race and socioeconomic class.
It is likely that economic, as well as public-health approaches, will be needed to address a problem that is reaching tragic proportions.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
