Infant mortality has risen in states that enacted tighter abortion restrictions in the wake of the June 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health decision. This occurs for newborns—those less than a day old—as well as older infants—those 1 month to 1 year old.

In addition, states with new restrictions that include health exceptions, which permit an abortion to be performed to save the life of the mother or in the case of life-limiting fetal abnormality, experience a similar increase in infant deaths. These are the key takeaways of our team’s August 2025 study published in the American Journal of Public Health.

For our research, we drew data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to determine how many infants died in each state between 2018 and 2023.

We then looked at changes in the number of infant deaths before a state introduced a new abortion restriction versus after, contrasting those changes with states that had not implemented new restrictions. In economic parlance, we estimated the “difference in differences.”

On average, states with abortion........

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