In other states where abortion bans went into force after the Dobbs decision in June 2022, researchers are still collecting vital statistics in order to study the effect of new prohibitions on births. Expectations have been that those bans would have an even greater effect on those seeking abortions than the S.B. 8 law did in Texas, because many of them prohibited all abortions and were adopted in a large number of contiguous states, making it difficult for women to travel to other states for procedures.
The study published on Thursday, which looked at data back to 2016, relied on provisional birth data for 2022 because fuller data was not available. It did not include demographic information such as the mother’s age or race that could be compared to prior years and used to understand other factors that may have played a role.
The researchers then created a statistical model of what Texas would have looked like without the abortion law. With that, they were able to estimate the number of births that would have taken place in that case.
“This is an indirect way of measuring what we can’t measure,” Ms. Gemmill said. “We don’t know the decisions behind whether people sought abortions, or whether they weren’t able to.”
Broader changes in birthrates have complicated researchers’ efforts. The number of births has been lower in recent years in Texas, and across the United States, a trend that was exacerbated at the height of the Covid emergency. But there has been a rise in births since the pandemic in Texas: There were around 389,000 births last year, down from 398,000 in 2016, but larger than the number recorded in 2020.
Other factors may have led to higher birth trends during that time period, Ms. Myers said, including a rise in the number of foreign-born mothers giving birth, many of them in Texas. Ms. Gemmill said that factor was hard to measure without detailed demographic data on births in 2022.
Despite the new restrictions under S.B. 8, many Texas women still obtained abortions, either by having them before the six-week cutoff, by traveling out of state for their procedures or by taking abortion medications on their own. Texas has seen a flood of mail-order pills, and some Texans have been able to get abortions in Mexico.
