Since the Supreme Court’s landmark June 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturned Roe v. Wade and federal abortion protections, a wave of state legislatures have rushed to impose bans and restrictions. According to the Guttmacher Institute, 41 states now have abortion bans in effect, including 12 with total bans.

“We hear about the endless, supposedly unintentional consequences of abortion bans like rising maternal mortality, child rape victims forced to travel across state lines, increased risk of criminalization, pregnant victims coerced by their abusers, all of that,” says journalist Kylie Cheung, author of “Coercion: Surviving and Resisting Abortion Bans.” “But I very much argue that these aren’t unintended consequences.”

This week on The Intercept Briefing, Cheung joins host Jessica Washington to trace the direct line from the Dobbs decision to state-sanctioned gender-based violence and control.

“This is what abortion bans function to do, which is to police and control pregnant people, to feed cycles of abuse, to be this tool in the toolbox of abusers. To enact racial violence and economic subjugation and essentially lower women and pregnant people and people who can become pregnant to this lowered class in our society,” says Cheung. “And that is not unintentional at all.

Listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

Transcript

Jessica Washington: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing. I’m Jessica Washington.

A year after the Supreme Court handed down the Dobbs decision — reversing Roe v. Wade and erasing decades of precedent enshrining the right to abortion — a Nebraska teenager was sentenced in connection to her abortion. Her arrest, which largely hinged on Facebook messages between the teen and her mother — garnered international attention.

In court, the then 18-year-old who was only 17 at the time of her abortion, testified that she’d been in an abusive relationship and was scared of sharing a child with her abuser.

“I was honestly scared at the time,” she told District Court Judge James Kube. “I didn’t know what to do.”

Despite her pleas, the judge seemingly dismissed her concerns over the abuse.

In July 2023, she was sentenced to 90 days in prison for “illegally concealing human remains” and received an additional two years of probation. Her mother, who’d helped her obtain the abortion medication, was also sentenced to two years in prison. The Nebraska teen’s case is just one of countless examples of how survivors of domestic violence find themselves crushed between the intersection of abortion bans, fetal personhood laws, and the criminal legal system in the post-Dobbs era.

Joining me now is Kylie Cheung, a journalist covering gender and power, and author of “Coercion: Surviving and Resisting Abortion Bans,” her new book connecting the through lines between the Dobbs decision and state-sanctioned gender-based violence and control.

Welcome to the show, Kylie.

Kylie Cheung: Thank you so much for having me.

JW: I want to start with this quote in your book that really hit me. You share this quote from Sara Ainsworth, senior legal and policy director at the reproductive justice legal organization If/When/How, about the reality of survivors living in states with abortion bans. She said, “You live in a state where you’re more likely to be criminalized than the person who’s abusing you. It’s devastating.” That’s a really haunting statement.

Kylie, what is the reality for survivors trying to access abortion care in states with fetal personhood laws and/or abortion bans?

KC: That quote definitely really stayed with me too and there were some lawmakers, I believe, in Missouri who are trying to raise awareness about how you couldn’t finalize a divorce while you’re pregnant in that state.

And I think what people need to know is that homicide is a leading cause of death for pregnant people and during pregnancy you might either experience abuse for the first time or abuse will escalate. And we also know that — because of incredible research projects like the Turnaway study, which tracked over the course of several years how the lives of people who sought but were unable to access abortion care — what the impacts were for the rest of their lives. And in addition to being at much greater risk of poverty or being pushed deeper into poverty, we saw that long-term domestic violence was also a much, much bigger risk, which makes sense as someone may be forced or entrapped within a relationship with an abusive partner.

I also was able to speak to several people who were forced to carry rape-induced pregnancies or carry children with their rapists. And sometimes that is a choice, and sometimes it is not a choice under these laws where we already have seen: There were research estimates that at least, or around 65,000 rape-induced pregnancies had occurred in 14 states that had banned or almost banned abortion. And in most of those states, there were no exceptions for rape attached to the bans. And just within one year of Dobbs in the summer of 2023, the National Domestic Violence Hotline said that they’d received double the number of calls about reproductive coercion compared to the year before. Just last month, there was another study that showed there were 9,000 more incidents of domestic violence after Dobbs in states that had banned abortion.

So we saw that these laws were associated with higher risk of intimate partner violence-related homicide. And the so-called “beautiful bill” or the budget bill that passed, if that provision that defunds abortion providers is allowed to stand, I think Planned Parenthood has estimated that 1 in 4 abortion providers across the country could be forced to shut down. But you know, what we really see is the abuser and the state occupying this conjoined role.

JW: Yeah, I’m really glad that you wrote........

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