Only an idiot would think we should eliminate emergency response in a natural disaster, education and healthcare for disabled children, gang crime investigations, clean air and water programs, monitoring of nursing home abuse, nuclear reactor regulation, and cancer research.

When we set out to do this analysis, we hoped to build on an existing methodology to study severe complications in early pregnancy — but there wasn't one. So, in consultation with dozens of experts, @sophiechou.bsky.social, Lizzie Presser and I developed our own. Here's how we did it: