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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That's public health question at jh.u.edu for future podcast episodes.

This is Lindsay Smith Rogers, and today we're talking about the impacts of abortion bans on live births and infant deaths.

Researchers Alison Gemmell and Suzanne Bell talk about their new study that looks at the real-world

consequences of abortion legislation in the first 18 months after the overturning of Roe v.

Let's listen.

Alison Gemmell and Suzanne Bell, thanks so much for coming back on public health on call.

Today we're talking about some new research you've done about the impact of abortion bans.

But first I want to back up a little bit.

We had you on the podcast last year, and we will link to that episode in the show notes,

to talk about some other research you did.

And I think that builds to what we're talking

about today. So, Alison, do you want to give us an overview of that work? Sure. So our original work

looked at the impact of a specific Texas policy known as SB8, which was one of the first major

abortion bans in the country and occurred prior to the Dobbs decision. And because the Texas policy was

implemented nearly a year before Dobbs, we were able to investigate the impacts of that policy first.

And we did so by conducting two separate analyses, leveraging birth and death certificate data.

So the first analysis looked at what happened to the number of live births after the policy,

and then the other was to look at what happened to infant mortality. And so in our analysis of fertility,

we found that the policy was associated with an almost additional 10,000 births in the state of

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