Are Republicans Hiding Infant and Maternal Mortality Data?

9.19.25

Click to skip ahead: In the States, news from Missouri, Washington, South Carolina, and more. Mississippi’s Disappearing Pregnancy Data digs into the GOP’s plan to hide what their laws are doing to women and babies. Anti-Abortion Strategy hones in on a new study that claims crisis pregnancy centers can replace Planned Parenthood. Attacks on Birth Control digs even further into that study to warn how the GOP plans to go after contraception. Fuck Them, Fight Back shines a light on the providers and activists refusing to let Texas Republicans push them around. In the Nation, some quick hits. ‘Coercion’ Watch has the latest installment of anti-abortion scare tactics.

---

In the States

We’re going to start with good news, but fair warning—it’s going to piss you off anyway.

A Missouri judge has ordered Republicans to write a new ballot summary for their abortion ban amendment. As you may remember, voters in the state passed a pro-choice ballot measure—Amendment 3—which protects abortion rights until ‘viability’. Since then, conservative lawmakers have thrown up every possible roadblock to keep abortion inaccessible, including putting a straight up abortion ban on the 2026 ballot.

Because Republicans know that voters overwhelmingly support abortion rights, they’re trying to trick Missourians about what their ballot measure would actually do. First, they called it Amendment 3. That’s right, Republicans’ abortion ban has the same name as the pro-choice measure that voters passed in November.

And the reason a judge is forcing them to rewrite the ballot summary? Well, take a look yourself at the language voters would see at every polling station around the state:

Most people reading would believe this was a pro-choice amendment! (And yes, that is language snuck in to ban gender-affirming care for young people.)

There is no indication that this amendment would allow legislators to ban nearly all abortions.

That’s why a judge ruled today that Secretary of State Denny Hoskins must rewrite the ballot summary proposal, noting that it “fails to adequately alert voters that the proposed constitutional amendment would eliminate [the 2024 pro-choice measure], which voters recently approved.”

St. Louis Public Radio reports that the judge gave Hoskins a week to submit a revised summary. Like I said, good news—but infuriating.

Some more positive news: Washington refuses to let its Planned Parenthood clinics go down without a fight. In the wake of a court ruling that prevents the organization from getting Medicaid dollars, the Washington State Standard reports that the state will make up for that lost funding.

Clinics will continue to submit claims to the state Health Care Authority for Medicaid reimbursement, as they have been—but now the reimbursements will come from the state, rather than the federal government. A spokesperson for Planned Parenthood Alliance Advocates said for patients, everything will remain the same: “The only thing that’s changing is where the money is coming from.” We love to see it!

Finally, let’s break out the world’s tiniest violin for South Carolina Sen. Rex Rice, co-sponsor of a bill that would strip exceptions from the state’s abortion ban, prohibit certain kinds of birth control, and even ban pro-choice websites. Rice tells a local outlet that since proposing SB 323, people are being super mean to him!

"I'm getting phone calls from people that don't identify themselves, but, you know, and stuff that quite honestly, I could not read the letters and I could not repeat the language that is coming after me on TV, quite honestly, you'd have to bleep it out.”

You know what’s worse than angry phone calls, Rex? Sepsis! Carrying your rapist’s baby! BEING PREGNANT WHEN YOU DON’T WANT TO BE!

If you need a refresher on the South Carolina legislation, check out AED’s explainer here.

Quick hits:

• Jay Jones, the Democratic nominee for Virginia Attorney General, has released a new ad attacking Republican AG Jason Miyares on his anti-abortion record;

• Jezebel reports that Florida’s Attorney General James Uthmeier said some dumb and false shit about abortion medication;

• And a board member of the Palmetto State Abortion Fund in South Carolina writes for Rewire about Republicans’ latest attempt to ban abortion and birth control.

Mississippi’s Disappearing Pregnancy Data

The Guardian reports this week that just as Mississippi’s infant death rate has been classified a public health emergency, Trump’s CDC has blocked the state from gathering vital pregnancy data.

Here’s the short version: Mississippi can’t collect information for its Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System (PRAMS) because the CDC gutted the Division of Reproductive Health. But there’s more: a state health department spokesperson also told The Guardian they stopped collecting data due to “a federal directive”…but refused to say what, exactly, that directive was.

Why wouldn’t the federal government want more information about pregnancy health? I’m sure it has nothing to do with the skyrocketing maternal and infant death rates in states with bans.

Remember, a study published just this month found infant deaths rose by 7.2% in states with bans—in part because women are forced to carry doomed pregnancies to term. (As The Guardian notes, one of the leading causes of infant deaths in Mississippi is congenital anomalies.) And women themselves are twice as likely to die during pregnancy in states with bans.

What’s happening in Mississippi comes at the same time as Republicans’ broader war on pregnancy data: maternal mortality committees have been shuttered in Idaho and Georgia, and Texas has started to stack its committee with anti-abortion activists.

Republican lawmakers are also fabricating fake abortion ‘complication’ statistics—a move to pin deaths and poor maternal health on reproductive healthcare that’s been proven safe for decades.

Here’s the thing: with reproductive rights groups over-extended and federal staff gutted, it’s the perfect time for Republicans to skew or bury data that makes them look bad. We’ll be keeping a close eye on what they’re up to, but expect some shady shit.

Anti-Abortion Strategy

While we’re on the subject of Republicans whitewashing the reality of abortion bans, you’re gonna love this one: conservatives are rallying around an anti-abortion ‘study’ claiming American women don’t really need Planned Parenthood—because “alternative providers” can fill the healthcare gap. (And yes, you can probably guess which ‘alternatives’ they mean.)

The report comes from the Charlotte Lozier Institute (CLI), an organization known for having research retracted, labeling anything past the first trimester as a “late” abortion, and even recommending women be forced into c-sections instead of getting life-saving abortions. In other words: total assholes.

CLI insists that it’s just fine Republicans are shuttering Planned Parenthood clinics because health centers, doctor’s offices, and—you guessed it—”pregnancy resource centers” can pick up the slack. This nonsense claim was repeated across conservative media this week, from the National Review to Center Square.

But let’s be real: over 38 million women live in a pregnancy care desert, and more than a third of U.S. counties are maternity care deserts. Since Dobbs, OBGYNs have fled anti-abortion states en masse—Idaho lost over a third of theirs—and maternity wards are closing left and right. Just this week, the former head of the Association of American Medical Colleges’ Research and Action Institute warned in TIME magazine that abortion bans are “creating a doctor shortage.”

So the idea that women can simply go somewhere else is fucking absurd. Nothing is more ridiculous, however, than the idea that anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers can replace Planned Parenthood clinics.

Planned Parenthood provides contraception, STI treatment, cancer screenings—and in some places, it’s a community’s sole health provider. CPCs, on the other hand, exist only to push disinformation about abortion and birth control. And the ‘resources’ they provide are largely limited to drugstore-grade pregnancy tests and diapers—items often contingent on taking Bible study classes.

Still, we knew this was coming. Back in June, Abortion, Every Day warned:

“If Planned Parenthood clinics can’t accept Medicaid, conservatives have a plan to fill that healthcare gap: they want to drive vulnerable patients to religious anti-abortion institutions.”

There’s a reason conservatives are pushing CPCs, and it’s not just that they help Republican lawmakers funnel taxpayer dollars to religious organizations. So let’s dig in a little further…

Attacks on Birth Control

Back in 2023, Abortion, Every Day warned about two Republican tactics to ban birth control:

• Redefining certain kinds of contraception as abortion. (Welp! ✅)

• Pushing crisis pregnancy centers to replace real reproductive healthcare clinics—enacting a de facto gag rule on contraception.

In fact, here’s what I wrote nearly exactly two years ago:

“…Republicans are enabling a massive expansion of crisis pregnancy centers—asserting that the groups will fill the healthcare gap their policies caused. The groups can’t prescribe birth control (after all, they’re not real medical clinics), nor can staff even talk about birth control or refer women to anyplace that does. Republicans are funding a multi-million dollar gag rule on contraception. They’re stripping communities of medical providers who offer real care, and replacing them with ideologues who will only talk about birth control to warn women away from it.”

That’s exactly what we’re watching happen right now, with groups like CLI working overtime to make the strategy sound credible. But scratch at the surface, and it all becomes clear. Check out what the report says about “pregnancy resource centers” and contraception:

“[M]ore than one in 10 pregnancy centers offer fertility awareness-based methods (FABMs) for women seeking to manage their fertility—an increasingly needed service as an estimated 22% of women ages 18-24 who used contraception in the past year have reported using an FABM as their primary method of avoiding pregnancy.”

In plain English? CPCs can’t and won’t prescribe birth control—or even talk about it—so they’re trying to make the rhythm method happen. And it’s not an accident that their focus on “fertility awareness” comes at the same time the Trump administration is moving to reroute Title X dollars into “infertility centers” and swap out sex education with ‘menstrual cycle classes’.

CLI even admits in the same report that Iowa’s family planning program saw an 86% drop after the state kicked Planned Parenthood out. But rather than recommend how states can prevent similar outcomes, CLI says don’t stress it—because the abortion rate didn’t rise.

All of which is to say: we’re deep in the middle of Republicans’ strategy to ban birth control. And like we’ve always warned, it was never going to come as a single law or sweeping ban. They don’t need to make contraception illegal—they just need to make it impossible to get.

Fuck Them, Fight Back

The bad news: Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed HB 7 into law this week—just as expected. The law empowers citizens to sue pretty much anyone who helps ship abortion pills into the state.

Read our HB 7 explainer for all the details, but the short version is that it incentivizes anti-abortion snitching with $100,000. (It’s wild that these people claim to be pro-family and pro-community while encouraging people to rat each other out.)

The real goal of the law is to make abortion providers, activists, and helpers feel like it’s just too legally and financially risky to help Texas patients. Their enforcement strategy is essentially fear and snitch culture.

Here’s the good news, though: abortion providers are already coming out to say fuck that.

Angel Foster of the Massachusetts Medication Abortion Access Project (The MAP) tells The Guardian, “Our mantra as a practice is: ‘No anticipatory obedience.” And Rebecca Nall, founder of I Need an A, tells the Associated Press, “We’re confident people in Texas (and every state) will still be able to get abortion pills by mail.”

That doesn’t mean there won’t be fallout. We know the law is likely to further isolate Texas women, making them too afraid to tell friends or family about their abortions. That’s why it’s so crucial to remind people that abortion funds and organizations in the state are still there and still fighting.

Kamyon Conner, Executive Director of Texas Equal Access Fund, put it perfectly: “Our communities are resilient, and we will keep showing up for one another with compassion and courage, no matter what politicians do.”

There’s no doubt that this law is a nightmare—but I’m so incredibly grateful, and in awe, of the people powering this movement.

In the Nation

• Ms. magazine has published the fourth and final installment in its series on anti-abortion violence;

• The 19th on what happens to patients without Planned Parenthood;

• The Electronic Frontier Foundation has more from their Stop Censoring Abortion campaign;

• Finally, I really appreciate that SELF magazine is debunking birth control myths—including the lie that certain kinds of contraception are actually abortions. (Though I wish it wasn’t necessary.)

‘Coercion’ Watch

Earlier this week, we flagged an op-ed from the president of Heartbeat International claiming that access to abortion pills by mail has “opened the floodgates for abuse—and women are paying the price.” Not to be outdone, the conservative Washington Times this week published not one but two propaganda stories insisting that cases of abusive men secretly giving women abortion pills are on the rise—and, of course, blaming the FDA for loosening restrictions.

Meanwhile, Live Action founder Lila Rose was in Newsweek repeating the same script, calling so-called “unregulated” abortion pills a “women’s health crisis.”

Abortion, Every Day has been tracking this tactic for a long time: pretending to care about abuse victims while pushing laws that actually endanger and trap them. But all you really need to know is that the Turnaway Study shows that those denied abortion are at greater risk of long-term domestic violence, and in the first year after Dobbs, calls to the National Domestic Violence Hotline involving reproductive coercion doubled.

Nonetheless, we have Christian nationalist publications like Christianity Today urging young men to step up as militant anti-abortion activists—exerting ever greater political control over our bodies and lives under the guise of ‘protection.’ Great.

If it feels like we’re writing about ‘coercion’ a lot these days, it’s because anti-abortion activists are hammering the strategy nonstop: they hope if they repeat it enough, mainstream outlets and legislators will buy in. It’s our job to make sure that never happens, and we’ll keep warning as long as it takes.