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Comment by keiferski | Hacker News Reader

The recent Roe decision was in 2022. The study covers 2014-2021.

But “red” states have been making reproductive healthcare harder and harder to access during the study period. One hypothesis to test is whether there are increases in mortality in such states after controlling for factors outside of access to reproductive healthcare. This will likely be hard to tease out because health outcomes tend to be worse in general in such states.

That's a fair point and one that had occurred to me.

The point would be stronger with some substantiation. If you've any ready to hand that would be useful.

Yes that is possible, but it’s not what the commenter wrote - which is what I was responding to. Your other claim here would require other evidence to substantiate it.

I wish we didn't use euphemisms like "reproductive healthcare" when talking about abortion, because I don't know if this comment is suggesting there have been actual changes to healthcare for pregnant women, or just saying there have been more unwanted babies delivered that would have been killed in-utero previously.

I know that private equity purchases of healthcare companies have decreased access to healthcare in rural areas and decreased quality of care at many hospitals. I know that PBMs (pharmacy benefit managers) have decreased access to medicines. I know that the AMA has restricted the number of OBGyn residency spots which keeps the number of doctors too small, and correspondingly overworked. I know that many experienced nurses left the field entirely during covid, due to hours/stress/pay/trauma leaving many hospitals and clinics understaffed and with inexperienced nurses barely out of school running wards.

Any of the things I listed in the second paragraph seem far more impactful than changing how many weeks pregnant a person can be to have an elective abortion, in terms of maternal deaths.

This is probably reaching for an ordered and political-centric view of reality.

But also mentions acceleration in the last 3 years.

That would seem to imply that the increase was already happening before the recent Roe decision?

Or that it was already increasing and something else made it increase even faster?

BTW I kind of like that the paper authors avoided this kind of speculation as to what may or may not have caused it.

But what would that "something else" be? Because the study ended before the 2022 decision.

I'm not sure what you're suggesting here. Clearly an event that happened after the study couldn't have impacted the study.

Oh, my bad! So it for sure wasn't that.

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