Three years later, High Court’s abortion ban results in growing crises

WASHINGTON—Three years after the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed the federal constitutional right to abortion, studies are increasingly pointing to the dire impact of that ban, state by state.

More domestic violence, lasting longer. Abortion clinics are closing. Women forced to travel long distances, if they could afford to do so, to get reproductive care—not just abortions, but pregnancy counseling, medications, and even basic health care. And, horribly, women who died and shouldn’t have.

Powered by the three Donald Trump-named justices, the court’s Republican majority threw out 49 years of constitutional rights in its 2022 anti-abortion Dobbs decision. It said the issue could be left to the states.

Texas is in the lead. It has the strictest ban of all, and even offers $10,000 bounties to anti-abortionists who report or turn in pregnant women who seek abortions, their helpers, or their doctors. That includes out-of-state doctors. The helpers can include supportive spouses.

As a matter of fact, three experts recently wrote in an opinion piece in the Journal of the American Medical Association, abortion bans empower domestic abusers and only make their abuses and their victims’ suffering worse than before.

As a result, attorney Elizabeth Tobin Tyler, Dr. Samuel Dickman, and Carl White, who holds a master of public health degree, wrote the frequency of the leading cause of death among pregnant women—murder—rises.

“Domestic abusers have long used reproductive coercion to keep their partners from leaving,” the three explained. “This often involves sabotaging birth control or blocking access to contraception and abortion. 

“Pregnancy itself is associated with increased vulnerability to violence. And homicide is the leading cause of death among pregnant women—higher than hypertensive disorders, hemorrhage, or sepsis—and is most often perpetrated by an intimate partner.

Elevated mortality risk

“Pregnant and postpartum individuals face elevated morbidity and mortality risks from abusive partners, especially in states with more restrictive abortion policies.”

The three explained that the higher risk to women victims from intimate partner violence remains regardless of the outcome—birth or not—of women who consider abortion. 

“When access to abortion is restricted, patients in violent relationships may be forced to maintain contact with abusive partners through pregnancy” and beyond, “prolonging vulnerability to violence and coercion…This enables abusers to harass, intimidate, and continue contact with the survivor.”

GOP President Donald Trump may enable that, too, warns Alexis McGill Johnson, president of the Planned Parenthood Action Fund. Even while Trump signed one executive order pardoning the 1,600 Trumpites who invaded the U.S. Capitol in 2001, he also pardoned 23 people who violated the Freedom of Access to Clinics Act. 

That law banned anti-abortionists from approaching too near to abortion clinics, harassing, impeding, or obstructing patients and providers. By pardoning those felons, Trump “greenlit violence against abortion providers, all at the expense of people who wish to live in peace and safely exercise the right to control their own bodies and health,” Johnson said then.

After Dobbs, deep-red states either rushed to implement new and onerous abortion restrictions or, in states like Wisconsin, revived absolute bans dating back to the 1800s.

“There are efforts to overturn or restrict abortion rights ballot measures in states like Missouri, Ohio, Montana, and Arizona. Abortion opponents never planned to leave the issue to the states; the goal has always been to ban abortion everywhere for everyone,” Planned Parenthood warns.

However, the first result of the court’s ruling was a mass uprising of angry voters that summer and fall, even in red states such as Kansas and Kentucky. There, state voters overturned legislative abortion bans by large margins. The anger caught the anti-abortionists off guard. It also gave Democrats a potent issue that fall. 

Florida would have joined that pro-abortion parade last year, when 55% of its voters favored writing abortion protections into the state constitution. However, the GOP lawmakers there required 60% approval. 

Also last year, Ohio’s GOP-gerrymandered legislature tried to stop a pro-abortion referendum by taking away voters’ rights to put any initiatives on the state ballot. In a referendum in the summer, women and their allies beat that brainstorm. They then voted in November to enshrine abortion rights.

Indiana tried to join the parade, too, with its right-wing Republican Attorney General recently agreeing to a settlement with the state’s top anti-abortion group, opening clinic medical records to it. But two MDs intervened in federal court, arguing such exposure infringes on federal health care privacy rights and the doctor-patient relationship. They won a temporary restraining order stopping the settlement.

Other impacts mark anniversary

Now, other impacts mark the anniversary of that ruling with studies, op-eds, and meetings hosted by pro-abortion congressional Democrats.

And Govs. J.B. Pritzker, D-Ill., and Michelle Lujan Grisham, D-N.M., wrote in Newsweek how their states have become reproductive rights havens for women seeking pregnancy treatment, medications, tests, and up to and including abortions. 

Though Pritzker didn’t say so, a pro-abortion clinic recently opened in economically downtrodden East St. Louis to provide services to women from as near as Missouri and as far away as Texas. It also provides new jobs to local residents. The states around Illinois are all anti-abortion, as are Texas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas, all also on the way to Illinois.

Planned Parenthood marked the anniversary by pointing out that the Trump-GOP “big beautiful” money bill, officially called “reconciliation,” now pending before the U.S. Senate “contains a backdoor abortion ban.”

To help pay for its $4.5 trillion tax cut for the 1%, the reconciliation bill cuts off all funds for reproductive rights clinics nationwide, among other spending cuts. Planned Parenthood Action Fund President Alexis McGill Johnson says the clinics not only provide abortions but also all sorts of reproductive rights care, including medications. 

Planned Parenthood estimates that some 200 clinics, most of them in rural areas or underserved areas of big cities, could close.

Rep. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., from a deep-blue state and a staunch abortion advocate, notes people of color are those most in need of help from the clinics, regardless of where they live.

Pressley cites the case of Adriana Smith, 30, a pregnant mother declared brain dead in February, who remained on life support due to Georgia’s abortion ban. Her son was delivered—healthy—last week, and Smith was taken off life support.

Adriana’s case “is far too common in the unjust history of denying Black women their dignity, humanity, and right to bodily autonomy,” Pressley said.

“State abortion bans such as Georgia’s deepen this pain and bar critical healthcare freedom.” 

“Despite arguing that abortion should be left to the states, congressional Republicans remain hellbent on banning abortion and shutting down Planned Parenthood health centers—so much so that they’re willing to deny patients access to all sexual and reproductive lifesaving care, like cancer screenings, STI testing, and birth control, to do it,” Planned Parenthood chief Johnson said in a statement. 

“It’s been three years since people in the United States have lost their federal constitutional right to abortion; three years since President Trump’s hand-picked Supreme Court justices stripped Americans of this fundamental right to freedom. 

“The consequences have been devastating, even lethal. We can’t know all the names of the women who have died because of abortion bans, but we will never forget that people have endured injury, pain, and suffering because of the Dobbs decision. We continue to fight President Trump and his backers’ attacks on reproductive rights, including their effort to ‘defund’ Planned Parenthood in Congress and end abortion access for everyone, everywhere. 

“Planned Parenthood Action Fund will never stop advocating for a country where all people have the power to control their own bodies, lives, and futures,” Johnson concludes.

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