Women With High-Risk Pregnancies Have Limited Options Under Abortion Bans

For over a year, we’ve been writing about pregnant women who have died in states that banned abortion after Roe v. Wade was overturned. And we’ve been trying to better understand: Who are the women who are most likely to suffer because of these new laws? Many of the early cases we uncovered involved fast-moving emergencies.

While women were miscarrying, they needed procedures to quickly empty their uterus, and, tragically, they didn’t get them in time. Yet we know that dangerous miscarriages like these are relatively rare events. What are far more common, experts have told us, are high-risk pregnancies, often on account of underlying health issues.

Each year, hundreds of thousands of women enter pregnancy with chronic conditions that put them at an elevated risk of long-term complications