Exclusive analysis finds the rate of maternal deaths in Texas increased 56% from 2019 to 2022, compared with just 11% nationwide during the same time period.
This is a form of class warfare: it isn't the rich women - they can go out of state or country to get proper medical care if they need it... it's poor women that are bearing this awful cost.
Please support Elevated Access in any way you can. Even if you are not a pilot or know jack shit about general aviation, you can help. Donate to them or reach out and drive a friend to a local ga airport. Its probably outside of your hometown. Ill land on a dirt strip to help.
I personally fly for them. Many pilots in texas do. We can cross state borders to get texas women the care they need and deserve. Colorado or new mexico doesnt have to be a ten hour drive. Ken Paxton and his ilk want to shut down the state highways to stop pro choice in Texas, but they cant stop federal airways.
I knew about Angel Flight but wasn’t aware of this. Thank you for sharing, and for flying! My dad was the top contributing pilot for Angel Flight in Texas a few years back. If he was still able to fly, I’d be pushing him to take this on as well.
They were never pro-life. They were never even pro-birth. They've never argued for anything like free pre-natal care. If something is wrong with your baby and you and your baby are going to die, that's god's will, so don't you dare get an abortion.
They are not pro-anything. They're anti-abortion. That's as far as it goes whether they admit it or not.
I call them forced-birth, which sums up their position well. They care nothing for the woman having the child and care nothing for the child after it's born. It's all about forcing that birth by whatever means... then walking away.
They’re not pro life. They’re anti women having sex, and want to punish women for doing something as natural as breathing. It’s going to bite them in the ass, but it will be too late for so many before it does.
You risk your own and others situational awareness when you paint everything as a race issue.
I grew up in Texas in a deep red county.
They believe abortion is literally the same as killing a healthy 2 year old. Straight up. THAT is the basis for their opposition to abortion, plain and simple.
You are dumbing down the discourse by being so focused on race.
It's both. Unfortunately, a lot of people are incredibly racist without even knowing that they are racists. They are just doing whatever they've always been doing, "and now, all of a sudden, that's racist." It's like when people are defending slavery because it was "normal at the time." It was still racist! It is now and it was then.
You're getting down voted, but you're right. The actual lawmakers are probably more racially motivated. But based on my experience growing up in Alabama, most of the regular "pro-life" voters seem motivated by a genuine belief that abortion is murder.
No, you're missing pieces of the puzzle. Modern day abortion bans are a piece of legal child trafficking via adoptions.
Latina girl tries to get an abortion. She shows up at a fake abortion clinic because she's ESL and those clinics are deceitful. She gets guilt tripped into giving her baby up for adoption.
The fake abortion clinic just so conveniently works with an adoption center that only adopts out to Christian families that can pay them about $20k-$40k for a kid. This money doesn't go to the birth mother. Most of these adopting families are white.
Then these Christian organizations go on to lobby for less social safety nets, less abortion access, less birth control access and education, thus driving more desperate girls to their clinics.
Race plays a part - this is continued genocide happening primarily against Native American Latinos who lack the same legal protections as Native Americans from here in the US, even though those borders didn't exist before we put them there. Those are very similar groups of people who share some ancestry and used to trade with each other.
Yes other races are damaged by this too. It's just not in the same way. It's okay to be intersectional instead of just giving up thinking about race altogether.
Almost everyone supports abortion in rapes cases and risk to life cases - it is very rare that someone literally thinks it's the same as murdering a toddler if you actually ask them about those "fringe" cases.
It's more that people are reactionary and don't want to actually think and so they just parrot whatever is comfortable to them.
It's pathetic these clowns call themselves pro-life without vomiting. Their platform is based entirely around murdering pregnant women. They don't care how many times you explain this is essential healthcare, they are happy to let these women die because in their mind they deserve it for daring to try and save their own life with an abortion. It will be so sad and predictable when they find out the women in their life get ectopic pregnancies too, I wonder how much their lives are worth to these dishonest ghouls.
Thats not the fucking point. The point is if you pass a law saying its illegal unless the mother is dying, you cant be fucking surprised when mothers die. You are so selfish, you can't even picture how this might impact someone else. You just repeat your rhetoric, and pat yourself on the back even though your response has nothing to do with what I was talking about. Tell me, how many lives does your belief cost? How much needless death is acceptable for you? You are talking about killing thousands and thousands of women, thats why you are hiding behind percentages, because it lets you mask the raw number of deaths. Will your opinion completely change when someone you love is killed or put at risk? Dont answer any of those, just tell what 1% of these supposed abortion numbers happens to be. Tell me exactly how many women you think deserve to die you fucking coward.
You'd think this would give republicans pause, or make them reconsider.
Young women dying in dramatically increasing numbers.
But it won't.
All these young women left to die on the altar of their misinterpretation of their religion and their uncaring principles.
But no, it was a policy born in hate and the tragic imposed deaths of women are not an unfortunate side effect, they're just misogyny in action. Working itself out.
If they cared about babies, there would be more support for women, for early years interventions, and maybe they might also care about children dying in schools on the altar of their misunderstanding of their 2nd amendment and their uncaring principles.
But no, they don't care about children dying in schools either, and do you know why? Because caring about children dying in schools doesn't involve telling women what they have to do and ruling their lives with oppressive freedom-denying laws.
Caring about children dying in schools would involve some infringement on their UNDENYABLE RIGHT TO FEEL IMPORTANT with a gun and caring about women dying in childbirth would interfere with their UNDENYABLE RIGHT TO FEEL IMPORTANT with a rule about what women can and can't do.
Edit: I think that's a genuine question from someone who is surprised by me calling it misinterpretation and has engaged with another perspective politely and unlike many people, is listening as well as expressing their point of view. I wish more people responded like that with a request for information and respectful discussion afterwards. Evidence shows that the "How?" was genuine. Hence my upvote.
I don't know any religious people who think abortion is great, but I don't know any pro-choice folk who think it's great either, they just think it shouldn't land a woman or a health professional in jail and they don't like that the maternal death rate is climbing so fast in Texas which had the first five-week abortion limit in the states.
Before the republicans figured they could be really judgemental and condemnatory about it (what does your Bible say about that kind of behavior?) and use it as a wedge issue to drive religious folks away from the democrats, it was originally a catholic-only thing to be absolutely opposed to abortion for a long time, justified by a misinterpretation of the sin of Onan, which the catholics somehow took to be a lesson about semen not being allowed on the floor, when it's quite clearly about family duty and not help to provide a kid for his brother's young widow who would otherwise be childless - held to be shameful for her. He wasn't kind. I think you could boldly interpret that story to be pro IVF but I don't think you can interpret it to be anti-abortion and anti women's choice unless you're really baked-in misogynistic before you think about it.
Yeah I know it says "do not murder" but the abortion bans are literally killing women with already dead foetuses because no health professional can afford to risk their career and freedom to take any step whatsoever to save their lives until it's obvious enough that they're at death's door that the court couldn't conclude otherwise. "She might have died later" isn't compelling enough - "she was coding" is.
I challenge you to find a bible passage explicitly condemning abortion. I can find you at least ten explicitly condemning judgementalism, but also condemning not caring for the poor, not caring for foreigners, walking by when others are suffering, not healing someone when you can. The modern republican party is so far from "What Would Jesus Do?" and worships the liar in chief, Donald J Trump.
So yes, somehow a bunch of big american corporate churchgoers got convinced that being rich is a sign you are a good person, that stopping abortion is the main lesson from the scriptures and that caring about black people, foreigners, poor people etc is evil. Somehow "let the person who did nothing wrong cast the first stone.... go, I don't condemn you either" became "lock her up". If you don't think that's a misinterpretation of your Bible, yours is different to the ones I've seen.
What is going on here? The laws came into place in September 2021, but mortality was already climbing from 2019-2021. What was going on those years to cause this? Then a sharp decline in mortality between 2021 and 2022 for two of the three groups.
I really wish the article talked about those years rather than just comparing 2019 to 2022, given that 2022 is a drop compared to 2021. Or if the article had showed the same chart with national data of those same years 2019-2022 for a good compare and contrast visual to show the national mortality rate climb and then post-Covid drop. As it is, the law goes into place and then mortality rate drops, which could easily be a talking point in its favor, even if it may be a deceptive point. By not addressing that, and instead glossing over the article seems incomplete.
Lockdown - domestic violence peaked during those years as well. Abusive men often use birth/pregnancy to abuse their partners, because they feel like their partner is obligated to be with them now that they share a child. There can also be some jealousy issues from the man towards the baby or the wife, since they get special treatment especially during pregnancy and right after.
So you'll see more stuff like deliberate poisoning (including sneakily feeding foods unsafe for pregnant women), beatings, rape. They will also delay or deny medical treatment.
Oh actually, that's probably a big reason too - people stopped going to the doctor during those years because we were told not to. It was too busy and overwhelmed. We were told you'd get covid and miscarry if you went in to the doctor also. Prenatal care is HUGE for preventing deaths during birth. My guess is a combo of factors.
According to the cdc website pretty much everywhere in the u.s. went up during 2020-2021 and things started coming down 2022-2023. In fact it looks like the average across the u.s. was pretty much back to “normal” by 2023. But what we see here is that while things declined again for TX in 2022, they still remain quite elevated above 2019 while the u.s. average went back to pre-pandemic average, which would tell me that something else is going on in TX unrelated to the pandemic.
For a more interesting question, why did it go down for everyone except white women, and increased for white women? That's weird enough that it feels like there's a reason, but I have no clue what it might be.
This graph is useless without a source. We don't know how the data was collected or how many data points are included (or discarded). This is probably just lying with statistics 101.
I've literally heard religious people say that women are supposed to be willing to die for their babies. If a woman wants to live and aborts a septic pregnancy she's a bad, immoral person.
It's super fucked up how much conviction they have when they say it too. Women are basically just a disposable womb to them. I always feel gross when I'm near someone saying that kind of shit.
Before my comment I want to make clear I agree with the conclusion that abortion bans are clearly killing women at statistically significant rates.
That said, the stats reporting here doesn't make sense:
Among Hispanic women, the rate of women dying while pregnant, during childbirth or soon after increased from 14.5% in 2019 to 18.9% in 2022. Rates among white women nearly doubled — from 20% to 39.1%. And Black women, who historically have higher chances of dying while pregnant, during childbirth or soon after, saw their rates go from 31.6% to 43.6%.
There's no way 14.5% of Hispanic women in Texas who got pregnant died some time during pregnancy, during child birth, or soon after. That would be unprecedented for any time since the advent of modern medicine. And the chart above this paragraph does not agree with it either. It's a chart of deaths per hundred THOUSAND live births, and the numbers for all racial groups are all under 100, so less than 0.1%.
The way it's stated also doesn't suggest it's a percent increase because it says it rose from 14.5% to 18.9%. I can't figure out what they're trying to say, but they should definitely have been more careful with presenting the numbers.