In the fall of Roe v. Wade, abortion advocates bemoaned the alleged lack of access to abortion nationwide, insisting it meant women were at risk. However, while maternal mortality is a real issue in the United States, the answer is not abortion – it is ensuring that women have better access to maternity health care.
Abortion deserts
The OB/GYN residency has remained competitive, but with slightly fewer applications in pro-life states. said Lucy Brown, a medical student at Indiana University ABC News with pro-abortion states at the top of his list. “I really want to stay in the Midwest. I wanted to be close to my family, but it kind of conflicted with my No. 1 priority,” she said, adding that she could not see herself moving back to Indiana once her residency is completed.
“I would find it very, very, very difficult to go back, as much as I want. “It’s really a tragedy for me not to be able to provide the full range of reproductive care and have to go every day and send people to Chicago, or wherever, and I can’t do it myself,” Brown said. My goal is to end up in Indiana, or at least around Indiana, but I don’t know if that would be a safe or realistic option.”
Adriana Traub, a medical student at Emory University in Georgia, expressed similar sentiments. “Personally, I would like to receive an education, if I go into OB-GYN, where I can learn how to provide abortion care services, and also provide all options to my patients without worrying about losing my medical license — without anyone worrying about having to tell a patient ‘no,'” she said. She reiterated that pro-life laws drove her to become an OB/GYN.” There is a huge demand for it,” he added.
Areas where there are not many abortion facilities are called “deserts of abortion,” meaning women have to travel 100 miles or more to have an abortion. And many abortion advocates say that lack of access to abortion will increase maternal mortality rates… and that women need abortions for their own reasons.
Maternity care deserts
But the bigger issue is not abortion; abortion does not lower maternal mortality rates. Worldwide, statistics have found that legalized abortion has had no positive effect on maternal mortality, and in some cases, has even worsened it.
In recent months, news outlets have tried to blame pro-life laws for things like hospital closings. Pro-abortion writer Danielle Campoamor insinuated in a piece for TODAY that Idaho’s maternity ward closings were linked to the state’s pro-life laws… though the hospital’s statement clarified that the real reason was low patient volumewhich means they cannot attract permanent pediatricians.
And when it comes to life-saving care, women don’t need more abortionists — they need more access to maternity care, something that is shrinking across the country. A 2022 report from the March of Dimes found that 36% of all counties are considered maternity care deserts, and “reduces access to maternity care in areas where it is most needed, affecting nearly seven million American women who are childbearing age and approximately 500,000 infants.”
A 2023 article published in JAMA Health Forum also mentioned the issue of maternity deserts, and provided a list of policy recommendations. None of them involved abortion; instead, they recommend investing more in growing the workforce, building more community-based services, and ensuring there is adequate health coverage for births.
said Dr. Elizabeth Cherot, chief medical officer for the March of Dimes ABC News last month that the issue of maternity deserts contributes to the high maternal mortality rate in the United States.
Rachael Morris, a maternal fetal medicine specialist at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, also explained that her team is working to address the issue by training first responders on how to handle pregnancy-related emergencies. “We teach you how to intubate a baby. We teach you how to deliver a baby,” he said, adding that 90% of maternal deaths in the past two years are preventable. “It’s scary. Something has to change.”
Dr. Monique Chireau Wubbenhorst, Assistant Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Duke University Medical Center, recently testified before a Senate committee, saying that “The solution to maternal mortality — and I work in this area around the world and in the United States for many years — is to improve health care, health education, and increase support for pregnant women. Abortion does nothing to address any of those issues.” He added that the “leading causes of maternal death… are deaths from cardiovascular causes, infections, and embolism and so on and so forth. Abortion will not reduce those deaths.”
A man suffered the loss of his pregnant wife and their preborn child because they did not get to the hospital in time. “We don’t have a hospital,” Byron Stribling said. “We don’t have an emergency room. The nearest hospital is about 15, 20 miles away, give or take.”
And meanwhile, across the country, maternity care units are in rural community continue closing. The reason is usually unrelated to the abortion. Childbirth is not a high-paying asset in the medical system, especially not in low-income communities. So even though proper maternal care is needed, money comes before women’s lives.
“There will be lives that will be lost — people need to know that,” Leslie Swan, a Native American doula, told the New York Times.
Women of color are more likely to live in a maternity desert, and less than half of women in rural areas do within 30 miles of available perinatal care.
Shayla Owen, 35, told the New York Times that she had to drive 70 miles on a desolate mountain pass to get to a hospital in Yakima when she gave birth; when they arrived, they were almost out of fuel. “I bled after the delivery,” she said. “So I’m glad I’m in the hospital.”
Forced abortion — the direct and intentional killing of an unborn baby — is not health care, and it is not medically necessary. What women need is not an abortion; they need legitimate health care.
