[Laurette Brown | Townhall] Twice-failed presidential candidate and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton tweeted an article Wednesday by Ilyse Hogue, the head of the abortion advocacy group NARAL, arguing that abortion restrictions will lead to women’s deaths.
“When anti-choice politicians limit access to reproductive care, women die,” Clinton tweeted.
She encouraged her followers to read the CNN article by Hogue, saying it explained “why we must continue to fight the new wave of six-week abortion bans that make women collateral damage for extremist views.”
Hogue’s article argues that heartbeat bills, which would ban abortion after about six weeks when the fetal heartbeat is detected, would “compound” the crisis of high maternal mortality rates.
She goes on to accuse Republicans of not caring about the maternal mortality crisis in Georgia, where Gov. Brian Kemp (R) has promised to sign the heartbeat bill, and throughout the nation.
“Instead of focusing on problems like maternal mortality, the GOP seems intent on pushing extreme bills like the one that just passed in Georgia,” she argued. “Kemp promised on the campaign trail that he would “sign the toughest abortion laws in the country” and all signs suggest he will sign HB 481 into law.”
However, Kemp also highlighted his solutions to the high maternal mortality rates on the campaign trail in November.
“We know that there is a direct correlation between access to maternal care and improved maternal health outcomes,” he said. “Our planis to enhance and increase any and all provider loan forgiveness programs for OB/GYN providers in rural Georgia to increase the number of providers in areas where mothers have to travel hours to seek maternal care.”
While Hogue argues that abortion bans will increase the maternal mortality rate, she does not cite any data in her article to back that claim.
The ‘women will literally die due to abortion restrictions’ argument is popular in the abortion movement but has little factual backing establishing any correlation between the two.
Former Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards attempted to push the correlation between maternal mortality and abortion restrictions in January 2017. She cited a statistic arguing that maternal mortality doubled in Texas after the state cut funding to Planned Parenthood in 2011.
However, the statistics in Texas have been attributed to flawed data.
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[Editor’s Note: This article was written by Laurette Brown and originally published at Townhall. Title changed by P&P.]