Welcome to Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health,

where we bring evidence, experience, and perspective to make sense of today's leading health challenges.

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This is Lindsay Smith Rogers.

Today I speak with Johns Hopkins researchers, Alison Gemmell and Suzanne Bell, about their new study looking at how laws that restrict access to abortion impact the rates of infant mortality.

Let's listen.

Suzanne Bell and Alison Gemmell, thank you so much for joining us on public health on call.

Today, we're talking about your your research looking into the impacts of abortion

restrictions on infant mortality. But let's start out with some specifics. We're talking

specifically here about Texas and about Senate Bill 8. So, Suzanne, could you give us a little

bit of background on this particular piece of

legislation? Sure. Thanks, Lindsay. Happy to be here today to discuss this with you. So Texas

Senate Bill 8 went into effect in September 1st, 2021, and it prohibited abortion after embryonic

cardiac activity, and that can occur as early as five to six weeks gestation. And the bill did not

have an exemption for congenital anomalies, which are detected later in the pregnancy. And at the time

SBA passed, it was the most restrictive abortion law in the country, as this was before the Supreme

Court's 22 Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization decision. This law, we have evidence now, has led to immediate

and significant decreases in facility-based abortions provided in the state, more requests for

medication abortion pills to self-manage one's abortion, and greater than expected life bursts among

people residing in Texas as work Allison and I have done previously demonstrated.

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