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While some states’ “trigger laws” went into effect after the radical right-wing Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, reversing decades of settled reproductive law, conservative-led legislatures like Texas pushed forward on enacting grotesque new abortion bans. The anti-abortion movement championed by so-called Christian conservatives is finally achieving the results everyone said they would achieve: Dead infants and tortured citizens.
CNN recently got their hands on preliminary infant mortality data from the Texas Department of State Health Services. The numbers are staggering. According to the Texas’ DHS, more than 2,200 infants died in the Lone Star state in 2022. This represents an increase of 11.5% from the previous year. The infant deaths due to “severe genetic and birth defects” increased 21.6 percent. Dr. Erika Werner, chair of obstetrics and gynecology at Tufts Medical Center, told the news site: “We all knew the infant mortality rate would go up, because many of these terminations were for pregnancies that don’t turn into healthy normal kids.
We don’t know how many of those infant deaths included someone being forced to bring an unviable fetus to term. But we do know that given the rise, there are definitely many Americans who were forced to birth a child with such profound defects that all medical personnel knew the child would not survive, all while the person giving birth was praying for their own survival. People like Amanda Zurawski, who suffered for days and developed sepsis when Texas doctors refused to abort her no longer viable fetus after her water broke at 18 weeks. Or Samantha Casiano, who vomited in court while giving truly harrowing testimony about being forced to carry a pregnancy to term and then having to hold her suffering infant for the few hours it lived.
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