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How the End of Roe Is Reshaping Medical Care: A Q&A With Alice Miranda Ollstein

In her new book Side Effects, the Politico reporter shows that the impact of abortion bans goes far beyond reproductive health care.

How the End of “Roe” Is Reshaping Medical Care: A Q&A With Alice Miranda Ollstein

In her new book “Side Effects,” the “Politico” reporter shows that the impact of abortion bans goes far beyond reproductive health care.

Alice Miranda Ollstein covers the politics of abortion as a reporter for Politico. But as she traveled the country reporting on the fallout from the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022, Ollstein began to hear another drumbeat in the background. “[O]ver the course of writing hundreds of articles, as I interviewed patients, doctors, pharmacists, researchers, and others impacted by the new restrictions, I saw how such laws were also eroding the quality and availability of health care—and not just reproductive health care,” Ollstein writes in her new book, Side Effects: How Abortion Bans Impact Everyone’s Health (published by The New Press this October).

In her book, Ollstein uncovers how the harmful consequences of abortion bans stretch well beyond miscarriage management, maternity care, and contraception, as well as, of course, delaying or outright denying care to those seeking abortions. Everyone from veterans suffering the effects of war to chronically ill patients seeking care for debilitating pain are affected by these laws. The Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision has sent ripple effects across the healthcare landscape, shaping where clinicians live, how they train, what drugs they prescribe, and how they conduct medical research. “No part of the healthcare system went untouched by Dobbs,” Ollstein told me. I interviewed her recently about the findings in her book, and as the midterms approach, I also took the opportunity to ask her about how abortion will affect the elections in November.

I’ve edited our conversation for clarity and length.

Amy Littlefield: Let’s start with an area of medicine impacted by Dobbs that is fully related to reproductive health care—contraception. How did banning abortion affect access to contraception?

Alice Miranda Ollstein: There are so many contradictory trends in the contraception space right now. You have, on the one hand, more demand than ever for contraception, including permanent contraception, because people are more afraid of an unintended pregnancy that they would not be able to terminate. On the other hand, there is reduced access. Some of that is due to the blurring of the line between what is an abortifacient and what is a contraceptive. There’s been a lot of misinformation about that, from official state government entities and circulating online. That has led to certain forms of contraception being excluded from government programs [and] government coverage. In some cases, universities that are state-run stopped providing certain forms of contraception because they were unsure if it would violate their new state abortion ban. A lot of it was in the immediate aftermath of Dobbs, but some of it still continues to this day.

Also by Amy Littlefield

The Terrifying Future of States’ Criminalizing Pregnant People Is Already Here October 20, 2026

The Terrifying Future of States’ Criminalizing Pregnant People Is Already Here

The Fissures and Fractures Behind the Right’s Pink Facade September 14, 2026

The Fissures and Fractures Behind the Right’s Pink........

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