A dramatic rise in pregnant women dying in Texas after abortion ban

I'm not sure how they're separating the effects of the pandemic from the effects of the abortion ban. Texas banned abortion in 2021 but the dramatic rise in maternal deaths started in 2020 and the number of maternal deaths actually dropped from 2021 to 2022, so that there were fewer deaths in 2022 than there were before the abortion ban in 2020. I suspect that the effect of the abortion ban is actually tiny compared to the effect of covid.

I'm also not sure what to make of the racial distribution of deaths. Deaths among black and Hispanic women dropped back down to near pre-pandemic levels by 2022, but deaths among white women actually continued to rise. This is despite the fact that before the ban, white women had legal abortions more rarely than either black and Hispanic women.