Texas' strict abortion law led to nearly 10,000 more births in under a year, study finds

• Texas' so-called heartbeat law likely led to 10,000 more births in under a year, a new study found.
• SB8, which banned abortions past six weeks of pregnancy, went into effect in September 2021.

After implementing one of the strictest abortion laws in the US in 2021, Texas experienced nearly 10,000 more births in under a year, a new study found.

Senate Bill 8, also known as the "heartbeat law," went into effect on September 1, 2021, and banned all abortions in the state after six weeks. The law's supporters and anti-abortion activists have backed such regulations because they say six weeks is when a fetal heartbeat is first detected, but doctors say it takes 9-10 weeks for a fetus to develop a heartbeat.

Furthermore, most people don't realize they're pregnant until at least 7 weeks or later.

The near-total abortion ban decreased abortions in Texas and six adjacent states by 38%, researchers wrote in the study, which was published in the journal JAMA last week.

Researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health hypothesized that fewer abortions would translate to more births in the state. They analyzed years of birth records in all 50 states and Washington, DC, to track trends and to figure out how SB8 might have impacted the number of births.

What they found was that "SB8 policy was associated with 9,799 additional births in Texas between April and December 2022," the researchers wrote.

The research team estimated that the state would have typically seen 287, 289 births in that nine-month period but instead, 297,088 babies were born during that same time period.

Monthly birth rates increased anywhere from 1.7% to 5.1% during the nine-month period that would have seen the first effects of SB8, the study said.

And all of this was set into motion before the Supreme Court overturned the federal right to an abortion when it decided Dobbs v. Women's Health Organization in June 2022, prompting Texas, among other states, to prohibit nearly all abortions.

The JAMA study was able to conclude the expected: that Texas likely experienced an increase in births because of a restrictive abortion bill that went into law, even though the number of abortions that Texans got out of state increased.