On Tuesday during the vice presidential debate between Governor Tim Walz and JD Vance, JD Vance tried to spin Trump’s dangerous, anti-reproductive freedom agenda and deny his support for a national abortion ban. He failed miserably. 

A reminder: in 2022, Vance said he ‘would like abortion to be illegal nationally’ and was ‘sympathetic’ to a national ban to stop women from traveling across states to get necessary reproductive health care. 

Meanwhile, Governor Tim Walz spoke passionately about tragedies like the story of Amber Thurman, whose death under Georgia’s Trump Abortion Ban was determined by medical experts to be preventable. All of this is a sad reminder that after Trump’s overturn of Roe v. Wade, his extreme abortion bans are putting lives at risk and undermining critical health care access: overall infant mortality rates and maternal mortality have spiked in states with abortion bans. With Trump abortion bans now in effect in 20 states, millions of women are being denied access to critical reproductive care, with doctors facing up to life in prison in some cases. This reality is only possible because of Donald Trump.

Now, if Trump and Vance have their way, their Project 2025 agenda would go even further – banning abortion nationwide and denying women life-saving reproductive care. 

DNC Spokesperson Maddy Mundy released the following statement: 

“As Trump and Vance try to obscure their record of ripping reproductive freedom away from women across the country, women are already dying.  Researchers and health experts are frantically raising the alarm as infant and maternal mortality rates have spiked in states that have implemented extreme Trump abortion bans. If Trump and Vance reach the White House, they’ll take these extreme attacks on reproductive freedom nationwide through their extreme Project 2025 agenda – from banning abortion nationwide to threatening health care providers with jail time just for doing their jobs. This is a crisis. To protect our fundamental freedoms, we must defeat Trump in November.”

Trump’s abortion bans threaten the lives of women in states across the country.

NBC News: A Dramatic Rise in Pregnant Women Dying in Texas After Abortion Ban

By Erika Edwards, Zinhle Essamuah, and Jason Kane

Key Point: “Texas law now prohibits all abortion except to save the life of the mother… The SB 8 effect, Cohen’s team found, was swift and stark. Within a year, maternal mortality rose in all racial groups studied. Among Hispanic women, the rate of women dying while pregnant, during childbirth or soon after increased from 14.5 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births in 2019 to 18.9 in 2022. Rates among white women nearly doubled — from 20 per 100,000 to 39.1. And Black women, who historically have higher chances of dying while pregnant, during childbirth or soon after, saw their rates go from 31.6 to 43.6 per 100,000 live births. While maternal mortality spiked overall during the pandemic, women dying while pregnant or during childbirth rose consistently in Texas following the state’s ban on abortion, according to the Gender Equity Policy Institute.”

ProPublica: Abortion Bans Have Delayed Emergency Medical Care. In Georgia, Experts Say This Mother’s Death Was Preventable.

By Kavitha Surana

Key Point: “The otherwise healthy 28-year-old medical assistant, who had her sights set on nursing school, should not have died, an official state committee recently concluded. Tasked with examining pregnancy-related deaths to improve maternal health, the experts, including 10 doctors, deemed hers ‘preventable’ and said the hospital’s delay in performing the critical procedure had a ‘large’ impact on her fatal outcome. Their reviews of individual patient cases are not made public. But ProPublica obtained reports that confirm that at least two women have already died after they couldn’t access legal abortions and timely medical care in their state.”

ProPublica: Afraid to Seek Care Amid Georgia’s Abortion Ban, She Stayed at Home and Died

By Kavitha Surana

Key Point: “They came to that conclusion after weighing the entire chain of events, from Miller’s underlying health conditions, to her decision to manage her abortion alone, to her reticence to seek medical care. ‘The fact that she felt that she had to make these decisions, that she didn’t have adequate choices here in Georgia, we felt that definitely influenced her case,’ one committee member told ProPublica. ‘She’s absolutely responding to this legislation.’ This is the second preventable death related to abortion bans that ProPublica is reporting this week.”

Rolling Stone: Florida Doctors Describe Dystopic Horrors as DeSantis Tries to Tank Abortion Measure

By Tessa Stuart

Key Point: “A new report, released on Tuesday by the nonprofit Physicians for Human Rights, confirms what Daniels is seeing for herself: that many doctors are delaying or refusing to provide necessary care out of fear of losing their medical licenses or going to jail; and that those doctors inclined to continue to providing necessary care have found navigating Florida’s exceptions is a Kafkaesque nightmare.”

Axios: Louisiana doctors prepare for nation’s first law reclassifying abortion drugs as controlled substances

By Chelsea Brasted

Key Point: “Louisiana will become the first state to classify misoprostol and mifepristone as controlled substances as abortion rights become a flashpoint in the presidential election. The drugs are also used for ulcer prevention and as treatments for constipation and postpartum hemorrhages. Before it became law, hundreds of doctors signed a letter opposing the bill, Jezebel reported.”

Washington Post: Louisiana hospitals and pharmacists prep for new abortion pill rules

By Emily Wax-Thibodeaux

Key Point: “Staff in some Louisiana hospitals are doing timed drills, sprinting from patient rooms and through halls to the locked medicine closets where the drugs used for abortions, incomplete miscarriages and postpartum hemorrhaging will have to be kept — as newly categorized controlled substances — starting Oct. 1.

That’s hardly the only preparation taking place across the state as a law targeting mifepristone and misoprostol, the first of its kind in the country, goes into effect in two weeks.”

Infant mortality rates have spiked in Texas after restrictive abortion bans went into effect, showcasing the danger of Trump abortion bans across the country. 

Washington Post: Infant death rate spiked in Texas after restrictive abortion law, study finds

By Victoria Bisset

Key Point:  “Infant deaths from fetal abnormalities, the leading cause of death for babies under a year of age, rose by 22.9 percent in Texas in 2022 but fell by 3.1 percent for the rest of the country, the study found. Infant deaths from unintentional injuries also increased by 20.7 percent in Texas in the same period, compared to 1.1 percent nationally.”

CNN: Link found in Texas between rising infant mortality and state’s abortion restrictions

By Rob Kuznia and Isabelle Chapman

Key Point: “This study provides some of the first empirical evidence on the association of restrictive abortion policies with infant deaths by using population-based data and a rigorous causal inference technique,’ the authors wrote. ‘Although replication and further analyses are needed to understand the mechanisms behind these findings, our results indicate that restrictive abortion policies may have important unintended consequences in terms of trauma to families and medical cost.’”

NBC News: Texas abortion ban linked to 13% increase in infant and newborn deaths

By Kaitlin Sullivan and Jason Kane

Key Point: “Lawmakers passed Texas Senate Bill 8, or SB8, in September 2021. The state law banned abortions as soon as a fetal heartbeat is detected, which can be as early as five weeks. This effectively banned abortion in the state, which used to allow abortion up to 22 weeks of pregnancy. The law did not include exemptions for congenital anomalies, including conditions that will cause a newborn to die soon after birth.” 

Axios: Study links spike in infant deaths to Texas abortion ban

By Adriel Bettelheim

Key Point: “The study authors said their findings are relevant since other states enacted similar strict bans after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade that compel women to continue pregnancies or overcome significant hurdles to obtain abortion care out of state.”

The Guardian: One death is too many’: abortion bans usher in US maternal mortality crisis

By Melody Schreiber

Key Point: “In the year following Texas’s abortion ban, child mortality shot up by 12.9% – compared with a 1.8% increase in the rest of the country, according to a recent study. Congenital anomalies are the leading cause of infant death in the US – but while they went down by 3.1% in the rest of the country, they went up by 22.9% in Texas.”

Vanity Fair: Texas’s “Pro-Life” Abortion Law Has Literally Led to More Infant Deaths

By Bess Levin

Key Point: “Anti-Abortion advocates talk a big game about protecting the “sanctity of life,” but in reality do not care about life at all—not the lives of mothers, whose rights they think nothing of taking away, or the babies they force pregnant people to carry to term. The most recent example of this hypocrisy? A new study showing that infant deaths increased in Texas in the wake of its near-total ban on abortions.”