Recently I wrote about the link between authoritarian populist, politics and declining life expectancy.
One of the factors I didn’t look at was the impact of banning abortion and the repeal of Roe Vs Wade.
Even before the repeal of Roe Vs Wade Republican controlled states, mostly in the South, introduced increasingly draconian laws to restrict abortion, laws which are now being updated to outright bans. Central to these laws are legal penalties for medical staff who carry out or assist in abortions. Big fines, losing their license to practice, or prison.
These laws have made it incredibly difficult for Doctors to practice in Obs and Gynae, and women’s reproductive health in general. In practice this means that states which have banned abortion have much worse reproductive health services. In some extreme cases states like Mississippi have hardly any reproductive health services at all.
This means that there is a massive variation in neo-natal mortality rates. California which has liberal abortion laws, and good reproductive health services, has roughly the same level of neo-natal deaths as Germany. Mississippi has banned abortion, has lost nearly all of it’s reproductive health services, and has a neo-natal mortality rate double that of California, roughly the same rates as Albania.
Fetal mortality rate follows the same pattern. California has 3.92/100,000, Mississippi has 8.2/100,000.
Deaths in childbirth have an even starker divide. The rise of restrictive abortion laws has led to a huge increase in deaths in childbirth in the US from 20/100,000 to 35/100,000. The variance is even greater; in California it is 7.9/100,000, in Mississsippi it is 79.5/100,000, a tenfold variance. Forcing women to have more children increases the death in childbirth rate massively. The UK has 9.5/100,000, the EU average is 8.
These statistics have an impact on life expectancy. If a proportion of your population doesn’t make it past the first few weeks of life, and mothers die in childbrith, it has a big impact on overall life expectancy
Really hard to understand someone who can tolerate mortality figures like that and call themselves pro-life.
Russia, which for decades had liberal abortion laws is now following Americas lead, restricting abortion, and limiting contraception in order to halt their disastrous population crash. More horrifying they are taking children form captured parts of Ukraine and shipping them to Russia to make up for the population crash. India has long been home to the awful conspiracy theory of ‘love jihad” in which Muslim men are accused of marrying Hindu women in order to reduce future Hindu populations and breed more Muslims.
And across the US right, Putin’s Russia, and Hindutva India there is the obsession with LGBT.
I am not one for complex political theory, but Michael Foucault use the phrase “biopolitics” to describe the application of political power to peoples bodies, particularly the bodies of marginalised groups.
There are plenty of examples of populations with a declining birth rate and liberal views; graduates tend towards liberal views, and fewer children. They do however has a longer and increasing life expectancy.
It is the combination of falling life expectancy, forcing women to have more babies, and authoritarian politics that is the issue, particularly when combined with despair and an obsession with vengeance. Guns, violence, suicide.
The Republican Party is not yet the party of the Handmaids Tale. Ohio became the latest state this week to make abortion rights part of the state constitution. Notably Republican state legislators have decided to ignore the vote and ban it anyway. The GOP commitment to democracy gets thinner by the day.