Hard to believe this gutter trash made it past a reporter, a couple of copyeditors and a news-editor-on-call.

But it did:

A Texas law that banned abortions in early pregnancy is associated with a stark increase in infant and newborn deaths, a study published Monday in JAMA Pediatrics found.

A ban on killing babies led to an "increase in infant and newborn deaths." Is that right?

But it's true: They're really pretending like this study makes sense, and they've developed a whole mythological methodology to go with it:

The new study compared infant death rates in Texas from 2018 to 2022 to those of 28 other states. The data included newborns 28 days or younger and infants up to 12 months old. Infant deaths in Texas rose by nearly 13% the year after SB8 was passed, from 1,985 in 2021 to 2,240 in 2022.

As one researcher put it: "The specific increase in deaths attributable to congenital anomalies really makes an ironclad link between the change in the law and the terrible outcomes that they're seeing for infants and families."

Folks, say it with me, all at once now:

Abortion bans lower the rate of "infant and newborn deaths," not raise them.

Abortion is the deliberate killing of a baby. If you make it illegal to kill babies, fewer babies will die.

Yes, babies with congenital defects will in many cases tragically die after being born. This is a brutal fact. Those families deserve our sympathy and prayers.

But that doesn't mean we should abort those babies — or any babies. And the fact of the matter is, when you disallow abortions in all but the most extreme cases, you get MANY fewer dead babies all around.

We know this for a fact because we have very good data from Texas on the matter:

This is not hard, people! It's very easy!

Some folks were nice enough to point this out to trash NBC in the comments:

Fewer baby deaths mean fewer baby deaths. It's math, people. Don't be fooled.

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