Study finds higher maternal mortality rates in states with more abortion restrictions

Countries with more heterogenous populations (whether in terms of race, income, regional differences, whatever) are not going to fit in the mold so well when comparing to other advanced wealthy countries.
This should be obvious with a bit of thinking.

(If the mathematical relationship between A and B is not completely linear, then a larger statistical spread of A will drastically change B, even if the average for A is still roughly the same)

Now, if you wanted to prove a point, you might try taking a segment of the population with identical hospital distance and standard of living and compare that population group to a similar segment of the population in some other country which you want to compare.

 

I suspect it will be pretty obvious in most cases how doctors are expected to interpret the law. There will only be a handful of grey zone cases, and I think even in most all of those cases the doctor will realize those are grey zones.

The real question is why don't Pro-Choicers show this same level of concern for this legal issue in other areas? Why only abortion?
If I didn't know better, I'd suspect it might just be an excuse being used to try to stand in the way and stop elective abortions from being restricted.

 

Being heterogenous is not an excuse for poor healthcare outcomes. Plus, other countries are heterogenous, too.

 

I'm guessing you DO know better.

 

The world is heterogenous, and yet some countries have very different healthcare outcomes than others.

Why, then, do you think it would not be an excuse?

 

A valid comparison would need to include countries that have our standard of living and comparable healthcare systems.

In those comparisons, we do not do well in certain categories - one being our stupendously high cost and another being in pregnancy related care.

 

But why? Within countries, different segments of the population (and regions) have different standards of living.

 

Different segments of the population are poorly served by our healthcare system.

Nobody gets a free pass on that failure.

 

Your “guess”. Don’t you ever research?

 

I really really really wish certain Americans would drag their ideas out of the 1960s and realise immigration has occurred in every country of the world and no country can claim “heterogeneous” populations any more

BTW when you get near a point make it!

 

Yes and……

I live in Australia. Everyone is guaranteed the same level of health care and I can assure you we have areas more sparsely populated than the U.SA

Australia’s Maternal Mortality- 5.5 per 100,000.


https://www.aihw.gov.au/reports/mothers-babies/maternal-deaths-australia#

Whereas in the USA

 

Show me any country in Africa or Latin America that has lower rates than the U.S. and I will be convinced.

Or at the very least, try to compare the statistics for an all white rural county in the U.S. to a comparable rural county in Australia, with similar income level. Then we can get to talking.

Otherwise, we can continue to fruitlessly cherry pick.

 

This is false. Healthcare concerns do not come as dichotomies as has been explained to you.

How dead does a fetus have to be before a doctor can remove it and not have a prosecutor end his career?

How much risk does there have to be before the woman can not wait for delivery before getting chemotherapy?

Etc., etc., etc.

Who makes the judgement of risk? The prosecutor! After all, he can call in other doctors to second guess the treating physician.

Republicans demand to move healthcare decision making from doctors to prosecutors. And, doctors thus must come nowhere near what they believe to be best practice, as they have to guess what prosecutors might think.

 

What country has a “heterogeneous” population these days? And WTF has that got to do with maternal mortality?

 

No problems - Northern Territory Australia

https://www.abs.gov.au/articles/snapshot-nt-2021
It has ONE tertiary level hospital - Darwin although Alice Springs is a decent size but Alice Springs also has less than 30,000 people. It is vast but sparsely populated
largely a mixture of First Nations and “White” (although I am buggered if I know a definition of white that everyone can agree on). Bottom line this state SHOULD have a high maternal mortality rate as the population is spread thinly over a vast area

But you know - I could not find the stats for the NT alone as all Australia only had 16 maternal deaths in 2020

https://www.aihw.gov.au/reports/mothers-babies/australias-mothers-babies/contents/maternal-deaths

So, let’s compare that to the USA

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hesta...ernal mortality rate for,20.1 in 2019 (Table).


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maternal_mortality_in_the_United_States

There is not one state in the USA that has a maternal mortality rate lower than Australia.

 

26.3% of the population in Australia's Northern Territory is aboriginal. The remainder is mostly all white.

Compare that to a state like Mississippi where 36.1% are Black and 56.1% are White.

The maternal mortality rate for Australian aboriginals is 16.4 (per 100,000).

The maternal mortality rate for women of Hispanic race in the U.S. is 18.2 (per 100,000).


This might help us understand part of the reason the rate is higher in the U.S. -
"The risk of maternal death increases with BMI (body mass index) ; it multiplied by 1.6 in overweight women and more than tripled in pregnant women with severe obesity."
Understanding maternal mortality in women with obesity and the role of care they receive: a national case-control study | International Journal of Obesity (nature.com)

Roughly 36 percent of U.S. adults are considered obese (excessively overweight).
In Australia 31.3% are obese.

 

It really is fascinating to just see you spray around random statistics here without any sort of argument attached. Its just this emotional need to deflect from America's failures by throwing up ethnic minorities and whatever other go to excuses you can find. It is sort of funny/sad.

The most disadvantaged group in Australia; the group that disproportionately lives in remote areas; often in third world conditions and is disproportionately impacted by substance abuse still has a lower maternal mortality rate than the whole of America. Lets just repeat that - the poorest & most unhealthy group in Australia is still better than the US average, and not just by a tiny amount - they have half the death rate of the 2021 average for all American women.

I understand that you simply cannot process that. You have to tell yourself that nowhere in the world can be compared to the US or that it is somehow the fault of ethnic minorities or....well whatever excuse you can find. Same excuses right wing Americans always reach for. All because you just can't accept that America simply doesn't care enough about pregnant women to give them decent health services. Its fine for the state to effectively take possession of their bodies and force them to risk their health & their lives to complete a pregnancy, but not for it to provide adequate healthcare.

The level of programming on display here is truly impressive.

 

Sounds logical:
Fewer abortion restrictions -> more abortions -> fewer mothers -> lower maternal mortality. :shrug:

 

Logic fail

 

Yes and because of a large proportion live in rural and VERY remote locations in small tribal/ family communities which often do not have a medical officer, and indeed there may not be a medical officer within a couple of hundred kilometres and we STILL HAVE A LOWER MATERNAL MORTALITY RATE THAN THE USA
One of the biggest causes of maternal mortality in the USA is peripartum haemorrhage- how does obesity cause that?

But let us do a comparison of obesity across countries to see if that is a cause for your horrific maternal mortality. This is from YOUR cited paper.

So, England slightly lower and what is England’s maternal mortality rate?

https://www.npeu.ox.ac.uk/mbrrace-u...Thus in this triennium 239,% CI 10.14 – 13.13).


Australia has an obesity problem

https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/h...f Australians,percent (1.3%) were underweight.

 

Please tell me why. I want to learn from you.

 

The healthcare impact of laws against women and their personal health care is well documented.

I suspect it is you who are depending on media as you work to ignore this issue.

 

I don't think more access to abortion will make the maternal mortality rate go down as much as you think.
The cases where it is known that a woman who is pregnant medically needs to get an abortion are rather rare, only account for a tiny fraction of total pregnancies. And of that tiny fraction, only an even tinier fraction are not obvious. To emphasize again, if it is obvious she needs abortion, there will be absolutely no reason to fear any pro-life laws.
In case you didn't know, women do not choose to get abortion because the doctor tells them there might be some health issues. They abort because either that particular pregnancy is very high risk, or they never wanted the baby in the first place.

The percent of abortions that are done for necessary health reasons are only around 1 percent or less. I'll be generous and imagine that maybe in 4 percent of that 1 percent might there be any worry of prosecution. So we are talking 0.04 percent.
Assuming abortion is allowed up to 6 weeks gestation (the recent trend in the most stringent of the pro-life states), that will already take 60% of the abortions off the table that you don't need to worry about. So now we're at 0.024 percent. And that's not even the death rate. That's just the rate at which a medically significant risk of death exists. For example, many of those cases might involve only a 5 or 10% chance of death, because remember, we're including only the non-obvious cases.

 

MMR is per 100,000 BIRTHS/ peripartum events. Abortions are not usually calculated into the statistics particularly since many are now performed at home and early in the pregnancy

 

And your statistics are based on……