The CDC failed in promise to get states to track deaths linked to abortion bans

After the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion in 2022, President Joe Biden issued an executive order tasking the federal government with assessing the “devastating implications for women’s health“ of new state abortion bans. “The committee must follow national guidelines in maternal mortality review committee death investigations,” said a spokesperson for Oklahoma’s health department, which oversees the committee in the state. “The current process includes documenting and understanding contributing factors.” But experts said that the CDC’s current guidance gives committees no standard way to consider the role abortion bans played in maternal deaths, which makes it harder to study deaths related to the restrictions and create an evidence base to inform recommendations. “CDC public data shows an alarming increase in maternal mortality in states that ban abortion,” said Nancy L. Cohen, president of Gender Equity Policy Institute, a nonpartisan research organization. When asked why the CDC has not created a checkbox to track deaths related to abortion access, a spokesperson for HHS, the CDC’s parent agency, said that the CDC “receives feedback from states on data fields.” The spokesperson noted that the discrimination checkbox was “added based on state requests” after a work group went through a multiyear process.