In Arkansas, state health officials announced an amazing statistic of 2023: The total number of abortion was in the state, where about 1.5 million women lived.
In South Dakota, official records also show zero abortion that year.
In the state of Idaho, the habitat of the recent abortion battles to the US Supreme Court, the official number of registered abortion was only five.
In nearly ten states with the prohibition of total or nearby abortion, government officials claimed that zero or a very few abortion operations occurred in 2023, the first full year after the Supreme Court canceled federal abortion rights.
These statistics were celebrated, the most recent available and published in government records, by anti -abortion activists. Medical professionals say that such accounts are not only incorrect, but essentially faithful.
Amy Kelly, OB-Gyn in Six Fols, South Dakota, who cited the patients who came to the hospital after taking miscarriages or that there are medical procedures that mean that there are any abortion in South Dakota is ridiculous. ” Ending unprecedented pregnancy.
For some data scientists, these statistics also indicate a disturbing direction: potential politicization of biomedics.
“It is very unreasonable,” said Upadhyy, a public health scientist at the University of California-San Francisco, who has participated in the presidency of Wecount, an academic research effort that has kept the outcome of the country’s abortion since April 2022.
Upadhyay said this zero is statistically unlikely, as it contradicts the fact that the pregnancy “comes with many risks and in many cases there will be a need to care for abortion in emergency situations.”
She said: “We know that they are sometimes necessary to save the life of a pregnant person, so I hope that there will be abortions in South Dakota.”
State officials reported a sharp decrease in the official number of abortion after the Supreme Court overturned Ro against a valley In June 2022.
- Arkansas reported any zero abortion in 2023, compared to 1621 in 2022.
- Texas mentioned 60 in 2023, after reporting 50,783 abortion in the state in 2021.
- Idahu was mentioned five in 2023 compared to 1553 in 2021.
- South Dakota, who was strongly restricted to abortion years ago Dobbs Judgment, zero was reported in 2023 compared to 192 abortion in 2021.
Politicians and anti -abortion activists referred to these statistics to enhance their allegations that the Crusade, which lasted for decades to end the abortion, is success.
“Undoubtedly, many pregnant mothers in Arkansas have sorry for life and the physical complications that miscarriage and infants can cause today in Arkansas,” He said in a press release. “This is the victory for them and our country.”
“The administration is unable to track abortions that take place outside the state or outside the health care facility.” She said that state officials collect data from “service providers and facilities in the country for urban abortion data reports as required under Arkansas Law.”
Wecount lists for healthcare abortions do not appear from a remote remote in the official state numbers. For example, from April to June 2024, its average of 240 is calculated from a monthly dimension in Arkansas.
Groups that oppose abortion rights recognize that government monitoring reports do not tell the full story of the abortion that occurs in their states. Mimms, from Arkansas, said the right to life, that she does not expect to report abortion in the state, because the procedure is illegal except for preventing the death of the patient.
“Women are still looking for abortion in Arkansas, whether illegally or outside the state for illegal abortion,” Mimms told KFF Health News. “We are not naive.”
Tia Kafka, Director of Marketing and Communication, said in an email that answers questions about statistics, that the Ministry of Health at South Dakota “collects the information it receives from health care organizations throughout the state and informs it accordingly.” Kafka refused to comment on specific questions about the miscarriage made in the state or the descriptions that the South Dakota report is defective.
Kim Floren, who is the director of the Justice Empowerment Network, which provides money and practical support to help South Dakota patients to obtain abortion care, expressed their lack of certification in the official numbers of the state.
“In 2023, we served more than 500 patients,” she said. “Most of them were South Dakota.”
“For the better or worse, government data is the official record,” said Ishhan Mihata, Director of Media and Democracy in a joint case. “You are not only reporting data. You feed on an ecosystem will have much greater repercussions.”
The state researchers said that
“This will create a historical record of the archives, researchers and people who will look at the continuous trend of decades and try to understand the impacts of the general policy that affected the health care of the mother,” said Mihata. Now, the degree guards do not seem “not fully thinking about the repercussions of their actions.”
Fear culture
Connections of abortion rights agree on a sharp decrease in the number of miscarriages in each state of the Sunnis of laws that criminalize abortion. In countries with a total ban, 63 clinics stopped providing miscarriage. Doctors and medical providers face criminal charges to provide or help abortion in at least dozens of states.
The practitioners find themselves working in a culture of confusion and fearfor Which can contribute to a frequency to reporting abortion – despite some of the efforts made by the state to clarify when allowing abortion.
For example, the Ministry of Health at South Dakota Melissa Magstate Release To clarify when miscarriage is legal according to the strict prohibition of the state.
The procedure is legal in South Dakota only when a woman faces death. Magstadt said that doctors should use a “reasonable medical judgment” and “document their thinking.”
Any doctor convicted of illegal abortion faces up to two years in prison.
At the location of reliable statistics, academic researchers in Wecount uses symbols such as stories to indicate that they cannot accurately capture the reality on the ground.
“We are trying to make an effort to clarify that it is not zero. Licensing.
She said, “Maybe this is what they should say, instead of putting zero in their reports.”
Mixed states of abortion data
For decades, dozens of countries of abortion have requested to collect detailed demographic information about women who suffer from miscarriage, including race, age, city and boycott – and in some cases, the marital status and the reason for the end of pregnancy.
Researchers who collect data on miscarriage say that there can be sound reasons for the general health of monitoring statistics surrounding medical care, which is to assess the impact of policy changes. This has become especially important in the wake of the Supreme Court of 2022 Dobbs The decision, which ended the federal right to abortion and open the door to laws in the states led by Republicans that restrict abortion and sometimes prohibited.
Isaac Mado-Zimit, the Guttmacher data scientist, said that the collection of data was used by abortion opponents in papers-burgundy clinics and forcing patients to answer the intrusive questions. He said: “It is part of a very long history of those tools used in the stigmatization of miscarriage.”
In South Dakota, the clinic employees were asked to report the weight of the contents of the uterus, including a woman’s blood, a condition that has no medical purpose and had an effect on exaggeration in the weight of the tissues of pregnancy. A clinic provided abortion care before the state’s ban.
Floren said: “If the procedural abortion, you should weigh everything that appeared and write that in the report,” Floren said.
The centers of control and prevention of diseases do not require abortion reports, nor do some countries that are led by democracy, including California, require healthcare clinics or providers to collect data. Every year, the Disease Control Center requests abortion data from the central health agencies of each state, the province of Colombia, and New York City, and these states and judicial states voluntarily on the collected data to be included in the annual disease control center.Monitor abortion “Report.
In countries that stipulate the tracking of public abortion, hospitals, clinics and doctors report the number of miscarriages on government health departments, as it is usually called “end -of -pregnancy” or ITOPS reports.
before Dobbs, These reports recorded procedural abortion and medicines. But after eliminating federal abortion rights, clinics were closed in states with a prohibition of criminal abortion. More patients have begun to access abortion drugs through online organizations, including access to aid, which do not fall under the laws reporting the mandatory state.
At least six states of the so -called “shield laws” were enacted to protect service providers who send birth control pills to patients in states with a prohibition of abortion. This includes New York, where Linda Brain, a family doctor who works to reach aid, describes and sends macke up to patients throughout the country.
In response to a question about the zero or very few abortion operations in 2023, Brain said it was sure that these statistics were wrong. For example, Texas reported 50,783 abortion in the state in 2021. State reports are now on average five a month. Wecount has recorded a rate of 2,800 from a monthly dimension in Texas from April to June 2024.
“In 2023, Aid Access has ever sent birth control pills to all the three concerned states – South Dakota, Arkansas and Texas,” said Brain.
The Texas Pact Prosecutor filed a lawsuit in January against a New York -based doctor, Maggie Carpenter, the co -founder of the abortion coalition for distance medication, to prescribe the abortion pills of Texas patient in violation of the prohibition of abortion near Texas. It is the first legal challenge to the New York Shield Law and threatens to obstruct pharmaceutical abortion.
However, some state officials in the states who have prohibited miscarriage have sought to strangle the supply of drugs that stimulate abortion. In May, the Arkansas Prosecutor Tim Griffin wrote letters of stopping and stopping Access to aid In the Netherlands and Women’s Medical Center options In New York City, he said that “miscarriages may not be legally charged to Arkansas” and accusing medical organizations that are likely to be “wrong, misleading and unreasonable” commercial practices “that carry up to $ 10,000 per violation.
Good government groups such as COMMON CAUUSE say that the risks of officials who depend on misleading statistics are countless, including the disintegration of general confidence as well as unintended legislation.
These concerns have increased through the wrong information surrounding health care, including a firm and audio movement to combat al-Qazam and the objections of some politicians who maintain the mandate related to Covid-19, including masks and perceptions and closing schools and businesses.
“If the state does not put a little more than the minimum to find out whether their data is accurate or not,” Mihita said, “We are in a very dangerous place.”
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this condition The first time appeared on KFF Health News It is republished here under the creative public license.
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