From WNYC Studios, it's Brian Lair, a daily politics podcast. It's Tuesday, June 28th.

I want to read you something from the data site, 538. You know 538?

They crunch numbers on things like poll numbers.

They aggregate polls and describe what the poll numbers taken together might mean there's

a lot of sports data on 538.

They look closely at elections.

Some of you know this site, Nate Silver site.

538 is a reference to the number of electoral votes in a presidential election, and they look closely state by state.

It's a data crunching site.

So this is the last place that I expected to find some analysis related to the growing illegality of abortion in America.

But I'm just going to read from 538, and you'll get why this appears on a data site.

It says, giving birth in the U.S. is already far more dangerous than in other wealthy countries.

Ending the protections of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that established the constitutional right to abortion could make it even more so. Multiple studies

have found that the states that already have the tightest restrictions on abortion also have the

highest rates of maternal and infant mortality. And that correlation

stubbornly persists after researchers account for some of the other differences between states

like racial demographics and health care policy. Some researchers think that abortion restrictions

are part of the reason why pregnancy and childbirth are so much more dangerous in the U.S.

Then it continues there are ways abortion restrictions could kill people both directly and indirectly,

and scientists say these correlations point toward dangerous disparities in health care, access in the U.S.,

not just in terms of who can get an abortion,

but also in terms of who can get preventative care while pregnant or even before.

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