Back in 2016, when the original Texas statistics were published, these numbers made global news. How could a jump that large happen in such a short timespan? The study authors urged caution, but nonetheless, the data seemed to fit within a larger trend: By all estimates, the United States is home to one of the highest maternal mortality rates — that is, the number of women who die in pregnancy or shortly after childbirth for every 100,000 births — in the developed world. Many connected the terrifying rise in Texas deaths to changes in the state’s funding : In 2011, in an effort to defund Planned Parenthood, legislators voted to cut the family planning budget by two-thirds, and followed that up in 2013 with an omnibus anti-abortion bill that was so onerous it closed half the state’s abortion clinics. (The Supreme Court stepped in to strike it down in 2016, but by then the damage was done.)