There’s too much horror in stories of women and girls unable to get abortions after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, but even so, this one from Time magazine stands out. “She Wasn’t Able to Get an Abortion. Now She’s a Mom. Soon She’ll Start 7th Grade,” the headline reads. The story of a child raped by a stranger and too traumatized to tell her mother what happened to her—a child whose doctor says “She just had no clue” she was pregnant—is heartbreaking. But the bigger picture in Mississippi, the state that pushed Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization to the Supreme Court and succeeded in getting Roe overturned, is enraging even without the trauma of a child rape victim.
Here’s a key paragraph where Mississippi shows itself:
Mississippi’s abortion ban is expected to result in thousands of additional births, often to low-income, high-risk mothers. Dr. Daniel Edney, Mississippi’s top health official, tells TIME his department is “actively preparing” for roughly 4,000 additional live births this year alone. Edney says improving maternal-health outcomes is the “No. 1 priority” for the Mississippi health department, which has invested $2 million into its Healthy Moms, Healthy Babies program to provide extra support for new mothers. “There is a sense of following through, and not just as a predominantly pro-life state,” says Edney. “We don’t just care about life in utero. We care about life, period, and that includes the mother’s life and the baby’s life.”
The state is investing $2 million into a program to provide extra support for new mothers, while anticipating an additional 4,000 births because it banned abortion. That’s $500 per baby. A year’s supply of diapers typically costs more than $800. That doesn’t even begin to factor in the mother’s lost income, the extremely high cost of formula, clothes, and more. In any case, this is not money that is going directly to families: It’s a program offering home visits and referrals for existing supports like food stamps.
A pittance of $500 per child is not “a sense of following through.” It is a joke. Somewhat more helpful is that Mississippi finally extended Medicaid coverage for new mothers to 12 months from its previous 60 days, after Gov. Tate Reeves dragged his feet for months, claiming he needed more data on whether extending health coverage to postpartum patients would be a good idea. That move came after Mississippi’s maternal mortality rate worsened between analyses of data from 2013 to 2016 and data from 2017 to 2019—a decline that fell on Black women, while maternal mortality rates for white women improved slightly.
The fact that Mississippi forced a traumatized child to give birth—because her mother didn’t know a rape exception to the state’s abortion ban existed, and because in any case that exception is a bit of language in the law to make it sound better and not a real, functional thing that people can access—is terrible. It’s the intent of the law, and it’s cruel. That the police in her case don’t seem to have any sense of urgency about finding her rapist is also unspeakably bad.
But Mississippi’s abortion ban, and other state laws like it, are not cruel only in the most horrifying cases. They represent a vast and callous disregard for women’s lives all around. That includes women like Lationna Halbert, who got pregnant in the weeks between when her hormonal birth control implant expired and when she could afford a new one, then sought an abortion from the Jackson Women’s Health Organization the month after Dobbs was decided. Instead, she gave birth in a hospital with no hot water and brought her baby home knowing she had no help paying for child care (and poor availability of affordable child care, in any case) so that she could go back to work. She had to put her dreams of going to cosmetology school on hold, while her boyfriend worked long hours to support their family.
These bans also make care worse for pregnant people who are seeking medical supervision throughout pregnancy and delivery, because, as Time reports, abortion bans make health care deserts worse:
When Emory University researcher Ariana Traub surveyed almost 500 third- and fourth-year medical students in 2022, close to 80% said that abortion laws influenced where they planned to apply to residency. Nearly 60% said they were unlikely to apply to any residency programs in states with abortion restrictions. Traub had assumed that abortion would be most important to students studying obstetrics, but was surprised to find that three-quarters of students across all medical specialties said that Dobbs was affecting their residency decisions.
Why? Because they do not want to live in states where their own health care or that of their family members would be compromised. “More than 24% of women in Mississippi have no birthing hospital within a 30-minute drive,” Time reports, “compared to the national average of roughly 10%.” And that’s before the Dobbs effect really takes hold.
Mississippi does not care about the lives of women, or children who become pregnant, or children who are born to families that are more likely to be in poverty because abortion was not available in the state with the highest overall and child poverty rates. There is no “sense of following through.” They do not “care about life, period, and that includes the mother’s life and the baby’s life.” It’s past time for them to stop pretending they do.
Laura Clawson
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