When Abortion Saves a Beating Heart

“Abortion kills a beating heart.” So declare opponents of abortion rights. We see those billboards everywhere.

For those who oppose abortion rights they also describe themselves as pro-life. Now that the US Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Clinic has overturned Roe v. Wade and the constitutional right to abortion, and states are rushing to restrict or ban this procedure, the question is what impact will all this have on life?

Specifically, will more lives be saved as a result of restrictions on abortion? The simple and clear answer based on the data is no.

While it is too soon to tell what impact the patchwork of abortion laws across the 50 states will have, we have global data that provides important clues. Statistical analysis of global data and abortion laws offer powerful insights on what might happen in the US as abortion laws are restricted.

Abortion Laws Around the Globe

Across the world abortion laws vary by government. The Center for Reproductive Rights has documented these laws. It ranks countries on a scale of one to five, with one being states such as Egypt and El Salvador that ban all abortions, up to states such as Canada, France, and even Russia that effectively leave the decision of terminating a pregnancy up to women and their doctors. The US used to be ranked five before Dobbs. All of America’s peers or advanced democracies are fives.

We can take these rankings and compare them to data compiled by the World Bank. The World Bank has data on more than 190 countries regarding women’s life expectancy in 2020, mother’s mortality during birth per100,000 in 2017, and infant mortality per 1,000 in 2017. Merging the data from the World Bank and the Center for Reproductive Rights we learn several things.

First, let’s compare countries with the most restrictive to the most permissive abortion laws. In countries that have the most restrictive abortion laws, the average life expectancy for women is 72.3 years, compared to 79.1 for those with the least restrictive laws. This is a difference of 6.8 years.

Second, in countries with the most restrictive abortion laws, the average mortality rate for mothers during birth is 223.7 deaths per 100,000 births, compared to 47.3 in states with the least restrictive laws. Women are nearly five times more likely to die during childbirth in countries that ban abortion.

Three, in countries with the most restrictive abortion laws, the infant mortality rate per 1,000 births is 24.95, compared to 9.38 in states with the least restrict abortion laws. The infant mortality rate is more than two-and-a-half times greater in countries that ban abortion. These differences are statistically significant.

Lower Life Expectancy Where Abortion Is Restricted

Another way to examine this issue is to see if there is any statistical correlation between how strict abortion laws are and female life expectancy, maternal birth mortality, and infant mortality. Running simple correlation tests, we find for the three a 0.397, -0.360, and a -0.409 relationship.

For those not statistically inclined, there is a moderate correlation between more permissive abortion laws and female life expectancy. There is also a moderate inverse relationship between more permissive abortion laws and maternal and infant mortality.

Simply put: Global evidence indicates that more restrictive abortion laws are associated with lower life expectancies for women and higher rates of mother and infant deaths.

There may be other factors that contribute to or explain these statistical patterns. But the dramatic differences across all of these three measures suggest that more women and babies die and die younger the more abortion is restricted.

Not to be callous with human life, but one wonders how many more lives may be saved as opposed to being lost by restricting abortion. If one is pro-life perhaps this calculus needs to be made.

However, based on the data at hand, restricting abortion may kill more lives than it saves.

This article does not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Bureau of National Affairs, Inc., the publisher of Bloomberg Law and Bloomberg Tax, or its owners.

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David Schultz is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Hamline University in Saint Paul, Minn., where he teaches classes on American politics and health-care policy. He is also a professor of law at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of more than 45 and 200 articles on various aspects of American politics and law