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'Bodies are piling up': Reporter finds GOP-led states are hiding abortion ban death toll (www.rawstory.com)

submitted 3 weeks ago by MicroWave@lemmy.world to c/politics@lemmy.world

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Summary

Republican-led states with near-total abortion bans are delaying or halting maternal mortality reviews, raising concerns about efforts to conceal rising deaths.

Texas, where maternal deaths rose 56% from 2019 to 2022, refused to review 2022-2023 cases, citing a backlog.

Investigations found multiple preventable deaths tied to abortion bans, such as Porsha Ngumenzi, who died after being denied miscarriage care.

Georgia fired its entire Maternal Mortality Review Committee after leaks about preventable deaths.

Critics argue these actions aim to suppress evidence linking abortion bans to maternal fatalities, delaying accountability for years.

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[-] Nougat@fedia.io 267 points 3 weeks ago

Texas ... refused to review 2022-2023 cases, citing a backlog.

"There's too many cases of maternal death, so we're just going to stop looking at them."

Good job, Texas.

[-] StopTouchingYourPhone@lemmy.world 22 points 3 weeks ago

Like the hundreds of thousands of untested rape kits that piled up over the decades.

Boxes about the size of a hardcover book each held evidence of a reported sexual assault – dried swabs of saliva and semen and blood, strands of hair, debris scraped from under fingernails. Each was collected from a person, most of them women and girls, during an hours long exam. And each was shelved without being processed for DNA. The evidence crowded storerooms, tangible proof of law enforcement’s failure to support victims and hold rapists accountable.

Testing the kits was supposed to be the first step in righting that wrong. In some places that received federal grants, not even that happened.

At least a dozen grant recipients carved out exceptions to testing, leaving kits unprocessed for a second time. In one California county, officials boasted they had cleared their backlog, but only after deeming more than half of their kits ineligible for testing.

In many cases, officials have done little beyond sending the kits to a lab, reviewing the results and again closing the files. In Maryland, according to a state report, some law enforcement agencies have shown “significant reluctance” to reopen investigations and have even stated outright that they are disregarding DNA matches.

What’s more, some officials all but abandoned the idea of providing victims answers about what happened to their rape kits or apologies for how long testing took. One Kansas police agency has tried to reach just 17 victims from roughly 1,100 sexual assault kits. An official there said there are instances where DNA testing has identified the names of suspects for the first time but the victims have not been told, because officials don’t think their cases can be prosecuted.

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this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2024

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