Michael J. New and the Sorcerer's Denominator: A Visiting Associate Professor of Moving Goalposts Explains Why Your Sepsis Is Statistically Insignificant
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No, National Review, Math Is Not a Cosplay Accessory
Michael J. New (2026) at National Review wants readers to believe that abortion bans are basically harmless. He took one look at a recent study about miscarriage care, waved some numbers around like a magician hiding a rabbit, and declared victory for the pro-life movement. The problem is that his argument falls apart the moment anyone actually checks the sources he claims to have read.
The Texas Timeline He Gets Wrong
New brags that the Texas Heartbeat Act took effect in September 2021, ten months before Dobbs, as if this proves some kind of point about timelines. He is right about the date, but he conveniently ignores that the law was immediately blocked by a federal judge, which prevented consistent enforcement during the period he pretends to analyze (Surana, 2023). Even more importantly, Texas had the earliest and most restrictive ban, and Texas also saw the worst outcomes. Federal investigators found that hospitals in Texas and another state denied abortion care to miscarrying patients in ways that broke federal law (Surana, 2023). One pregnant woman in Texas died after doctors delayed treating her miscarriage for 40 hours because they were terrified of the state’s abortion ban. Those cases are not outliers. They are exactly what happens when politicians write medical statutes.
Comparing Apples and Miscarriages
New starts with a study from the American Journal of Public Health that looked at insurance claims for over 123,000 miscarriages. He notes that in states with abortion bans, more women miscarried without any medical intervention after Dobbs. In his telling, this is no big deal because plenty of miscarriages resolve on their own. He points out that the percentages went from 73.2 percent to 76.7 percent in ban states and from 69.7 percent to 70.4 percent in permissive states and calls the difference marginal (New, 2026).
Here is what he leaves out. A miscarriage that resolves naturally at home is not the issue. The issue is a miscarriage that requires medical intervention and does not get it. When a pregnant person is bleeding out or septic and doctors are terrified to act because state law treats them like criminals, that is the crisis. New distracts readers with statistics about naturally resolving pregnancies so they will not ask about the women who show up at emergency rooms and are turned away.
Infant Mortality by the Numbers
New claims infant mortality in the United States has declined since the fourth quarter of 2022. He gives no numbers, just a vague trendline. The actual CDC data show that infant mortality rose in 2022 for the first time in twenty years, climbing from 5.44 deaths per 1,000 live births to 5.61 (Hagen, 2023). The rate stayed flat at 5.61 in 2023 (Murphy et al., 2024). So when New says it declined since late 2022, he is either cherry-picking quarterly fluctuations or hoping readers will not look it up.
Meanwhile, a study published in JAMA found that states with abortion bans had 5.6 percent higher infant mortality than expected, resulting in an estimated 478 additional infant deaths (Gemmill et al., 2025). Texas accounted for 384 of those excess deaths because its ban started earliest. Black infants in ban states died at a rate 11 percent higher than expected. Those are not trends. Those are babies.
The Maternal Mortality Shell Game
New claims maternal mortality dropped over 25 percent since 2022 according to the CDC. The actual CDC data show the maternal mortality rate was 22.3 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2022 (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC], 2023), 18.6 in 2023, and 17.9 in 2024 (Tsai, 2026). That is roughly a 20 percent decline from 2022 to 2024, not over 25 percent. Even if readers grant him the direction, he is ignoring the baseline reality.
The Commonwealth Fund found that in 2020, maternal death rates in abortion-restriction states were 62 percent higher than in abortion-access states, 28.8 versus 17.8 deaths per 100,000 births (Commonwealth Fund, 2022). Tulane researchers found that states with more abortion restrictions had a 7 percent increase in total maternal mortality (Vilda et al., 2021). And Johns Hopkins researchers found a possible 9.2 percent increase in pregnancy-associated deaths in ban states (Bell et al., 2026).
New mentions two studies that found no statistically significant difference in maternal mortality trends. He does not tell readers that those studies looked at the narrowest possible definition of maternal mortality. That definition covers only deaths within 42 days from obstetric causes, which is so rare that detecting a change is statistically difficult. It is like claiming a factory is safe because regulators cannot prove it caused one specific rare cancer, while ignoring the overall body count. Meanwhile, broader measures of deaths during and after pregnancy show clear harm.
Stop Pretending Bad Policy Is Good Medicine
At the end of the day, New’s article is not an argument. It is a sedative. He grabs unrelated correlations, dangles trendlines without actual numbers, and hides the fact that conservative states with abortion bans already had worse maternal and infant health outcomes before Dobbs and have continued to have worse outcomes after. The data are clear. Abortion bans correlate with more infant deaths, higher baseline maternal mortality, and documented cases of delayed emergency care. Readers do not need a doctorate in biostatistics to see it. They just need to read past the headline.
If your brain needs a vacation from logic and your soul craves sentences that evaporate on contact with oxygen, treat yourself to the original here: https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/no-strong-pro-life-laws-have-not-worsened-miscarriage-care/
Work Cited
Bell, S. O., Franks, A. M., Ozinsky, A., Anjur-Dietrich, S., Margerison, C. E., Stuart, E. A., Feller, A., & Gemmill, A. (2026). Abortion bans and maternal, pregnancy-related, and pregnancy-associated mortality in 14 US States, 2016-2023: Estimated impacts amid substantial measurement challenges. *American Journal of Public Health*. https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/10.2105/AJPH.2026.308465
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2023). *Maternal mortality rates in the United States, 2022* (Health E-Stats). https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/maternal-mortality/2022/maternal-mortality-rates-2022.pdf
Commonwealth Fund. (2022, December). *U.S. maternal health divide: Limited services and worse outcomes* (Issue Brief). https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-briefs/2022/dec/us-maternal-health-divide-limited-services-worse-outcomes
Gemmill, A., Franks, A., Anjur-Dietrich, S., Ozinsky, A., Arbour, D., Stuart, E., Ben-Michael, E., Feller, A., & Bell, S. (2025). US abortion bans and infant mortality. *JAMA*. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2830298
Hagen, C. (2023, November 1). Infant mortality rate sees first rise in 20 years. NCHS Blogs. https://blogs.cdc.gov/nchs/2023/11/01/7479/
Murphy, S. L., Kochanek, K. D., Xu, J. Q., & Arias, E. (2024). *Mortality in the United States, 2023* (NCHS Data Brief No. 521). National Center for Health Statistics. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK611296/
New, M. J. (2026, May 20). No, strong pro-life laws have not worsened miscarriage care. *National Review*. https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/no-strong-pro-life-laws-have-not-worsened-miscarriage-care/
Surana, K. (2023, May 19). Hospitals in two states denied an abortion to a miscarrying patient. *ProPublica*. https://www.propublica.org/article/two-hospitals-denied-abortion-miscarrying-patient-breaking-federal-law
Tsai, B. (2026, March 4). NCHS releases final 2024 maternal mortality data. NCHS Blogs. https://blogs.cdc.gov/nchs/2026/03/04/7885/
Vilda, D., Wallace, M., Daniel, C., Goldin Evans, M., Stoecker, C., & Theall, K. (2021). State abortion policies and maternal death in the United States, 2015-2018. *American Journal of Public Health*, *111*(11), 2027-2036. https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/full/10.2105/AJPH.2021.306396