The act authorizing Arkansas’ Monument to the Unborn, passed last year, explains that “from 1973 until 2022, Arkansas was prevented from protecting the life of unborn children” by Supreme Court decisions such as Roe v. Wade.

We all know what happened in 2022. On June 24, in Dobbs v. Jackson, the conservative majority removed federal protection for abortion that had stood for almost 50 years.

“As of today,” wrote Justice Stephen G. Breyer, dissenting along with Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, “this Court holds, a State can always force a woman to give birth, prohibiting even the earliest abortions. A State can thus transform what, when freely undertaken, is a wonder into what, when forced, may be a nightmare.”

The Arkansas birthrate has gone up an estimated 1.4 percent since the state began forcing its residents to carry pregnancies to term. That means about 500 additional births a year. In all states with total bans, including Arkansas and 13 others, the birthrate has increased an average of 2.3 percent. In Texas, where geography makes it especially difficult to travel out of state for an abortion, the rate increased by 5.1 percent. All told, early estimates indicate that the end of Roe accounts for 32,000 annual additional births.

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Buried under that approximate number of compulsory births lies another number: the lives that Dobbs has ended.

We need a monument to them.

Consider, for a moment, the people who have died in the past two years from complications of pregnancies they wanted to end but couldn’t.

When a state forces people to carry pregnancies to term — at least 14 times more likely to result in death than an abortion — it forces them to risk their lives. Some inevitably fall — have fallen — on the wrong side of the odds. Those lives have been lost to Dobbs.

In fact, abortion bans make pregnancy even more dangerous than it already was. In abortion-ban states, patients with ectopic pregnancies, miscarriages and excessive hemorrhaging — conditions that call for abortion care — can’t be treated until fetal heartbeats disappear or patients are on the brink of death. One Texas study found those delays nearly doubled the serious complications patients suffered.

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Surely some patients died while doctors had to wait or wonder whether they were sick enough to treat. Although every state abortion ban includes an exception to save the life of the pregnant person, few exceptions are actually granted.

And then there are desperate people in abortion-ban states who have tried to end their pregnancies by unsafe means. We know that unsafe abortions can kill. Since these decisions are shrouded in secrecy, stigma and potential legal jeopardy, we might never know how many.

Still, those losses are the easier ones to count. The true cost of Dobbs is far........

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