Reporting by Propublica in September revealed a harrowing statistic: deaths from ectopic pregnancies in the United States have doubled since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and struck down a constitutional right to abortion. You can – and should! – read their full analysis. But these dangerous pregnancies, when an embryo implants outside the uterus, are killing more women.
Here’s the number you need to know: states with abortion bans, like Arkansas, average 13.1 deaths because of ectopic pregnancies per million births. The national average is 9.8 deaths per million births, and in states without abortion bans, the rate is 7.1 deaths per million births. Arkansas’s death rate is nearly double that of states that allow doctors to practice medicine without threats from the state.
Our state fails pregnant women, full stop, and we’ve been banging this drum for years. Today, we want to talk about two specific ways that the state of Arkansas fails its expecting moms.
Let’s talk about poorly-worded laws and unregulated pregnancy centers (UPCs).
The Legislature’s Rhetorical Slight of Hand
In the controlling law that bans abortion in Arkansas, the legislature does a neat trick: they simply say that an abortion isn’t an abortion as long as it’s to remove an ectopic pregnancy. Even our extremist legislature knows that explicitly banning the treatment of an ectopic pregnancy goes too far.
Unfortunately for our linguistically-challenged legislators, words don’t work this way. The treatment for ectopic pregnancy, according to the Mayo Clinic, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and Johns Hopkins Medicine is to stop the pregnancy from developing and remove the tissue, either by an injection of methotrexate or laparoscopic surgery (in most cases).
That is definitionally an abortion, whatever the legislature says.
But the legislature’s rhetorical trick here has consequences.
Doctors feel they can’t provide the standard of care here because other laws in Arkansas state make abortion care a felony if the fetus still has a heartbeat. Many fetuses in ectopic pregnancies are otherwise healthy, even though the pregnancy can never be viable. There’s a heartbeat, and that’s where the legislature decided to make the line.
This has happened in Arkansas. Leitaea Lowrimore’s doctor diagnosed her with an ectopic pregnancy, and instead of providing the care he knew she needed, he sent her home. He could “do 10 years in prison,” he said. Lowrimore is now one of the women suing the state of Arkansas to overturn the total abortion ban.
This absurd redefinition of a medical procedure to suit the legislature’s extreme whims nearly killed a woman. According to Propublica’s reporting, it’s probably killed more we don’t know about.
UPCs and Poor Standards of Care
Unregulated pregnancy centers pretend to offer prenatal care to women. What they actually do is dissuade women from seeking proper medical care if that care involves anything they consider “abortion.” Our legislature rewarded this deceptive behavior by distributing $1.7 million in funding to UPCs in 2026 alone.
UPCs have a particularly gruesome strategy for dealing with suspected ectopic pregnancies. Because a large part of their model is provided free ultrasounds – often how ectopic pregnancies are diagnosed – they have to be careful when they have a client with a suspected ectopic pregnancy.
They are not real medical centers, cannot legally provide real care, and often don’t have doctors or nurses on staff. They know, however, that the standard of care for ectopic pregnancies is an abortion, and they know they’d be held liable if they refused to tell a client that they suspected an ectopic pregnancy.
Their solution is simply to deny the client any kind of scan or ultrasound at all. These extremists are so dedicated to ignoring standards of care for pregnant women that they will ignore and turn away women who are desperate for help.
Legal advocates for UPCs give this advice because in 2023, a client with an ectopic pregnancy nearly died because the UPC she went to didn’t inform her the pregnancy wasn’t viable.
So, to recap, instead of funding postpartum Medicaid and allowing doctors to practice proper reproductive healthcare, the state of Arkansas prefers to fund dishonest and dangerous “clinics” that nearly kill women and let women with ectopic pregnancies “figure it out.”
Pregnant Arkansans – all Arkansans – deserve better.
