Abortion Bans Worsen Violence in Relationships, Study Finds

In the days and months which followed the Supreme Court of a decision in 2022 to eliminate the American constitutional protection of abortion, the defenders predicted many upcoming negative impacts for women and their families.

At least one of these predictions has become reality: there has been an increase in the violence of intimate partners in places with an almost total ban on abortion. The violence between intimate partners, which occurs between two people in a romantic relationship, has increased by around 7 to 10% in American counties where people had to travel more for abortion care in 2023 than in 2017, according to a new study published at the National Office of Economic Research.

This has led to approximately 9,000 additional incidents of violence between intimate partners in states that limit rights to abortion, according to the study, which is one of the first to examine the data on how the restrictions on access to abortion are linked to violence. This increases $ 1.24 billion in additional social costs, according to the study.

There are several reasons why abortion restrictions could lead to increased violence of intimate partners, according to study authors. Restrictions often lead to more financial tension because women must take leave of work and move further to request abortion care. (The average person looking for care in such a state must have traveled 241 miles further for abortion care than women in states without these laws.) Restrictions limit the options of people, which could worsen the mental and physical health of women and men, which leads to abuse. And pregnancy is already known to increase the violence of intimate partners; A study revealed that pregnant women were 16% more likely to die by homicide than non -pregnant women.

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Restrictions on abortion can also link women to violent partners. The Turnaway study, which examined what happened to women denied an abortion because they were beyond the gestational limit of the clinic, revealed that these women had suffered a more intimate partner violence compared to those who were able to obtain an abortion. They were also more at risk of suicidal ideas.

Abortion restrictions can worsen the violence of intimate partners even if women end up having an abortion, explains Dhaval Dave, professor of economics at Bentley University in Massachusetts and one of the study authors. “Delays, financial strains, stress and prolonged engagement with violent partners can all affect the quality of relationships and increase the risk of interpersonal violence, even if an abortion is finally obtained,” he said.

The study also revealed a greater increase in the violence of intimate partners in the fields with a level of education and lower income, which suggests that restrictions are more harmful to vulnerable populations, he said.

The new data do not surprise experts in the field of violence between intimate partners, who say that the increase in incidents was quite predictable. Restrictions on abortion allow coercion of reproduction, in which an intimate partner uses control tactics to influence the reproduction choices of the other person without their consent, explains Sara L. Ainsworth, legal and political director of FI / When / How, a non -profit organization that flows the legal reproduction hotline for people with legal advice on pregnancy and abortion.

Learn more:: Abortions continue to increase in the United States, show the data

The current legal climate has also allowed the attackers to more easily threaten victims of boresic health decisions, she said. Indeed, some states, including Idaho and Texas, have criminalized the act of helping people looking for abortion care. This can further isolate victims of people who could otherwise help them navigate in an abusive relationship.

Ainsworth says that the Hotline de REP legal has increased by people who call relations that have become violent and in those in which the aggressor threatens to involve the police around genesic health decisions. Even if this is not legal in many states, the threat of police involvement is enough to frighten many women, she said.

“The aggressor uses this landscape in which we are to terrorize the person who is his intimate partner,” she says.

Across the country, hotlines have experienced a 10% increase in calls from victims who face a dangerous pregnancy, which is the one in which they are subject to abuse, explains Pamela Jacobs, CEO of the National Resource Center on Domestic Violence. Even before the abortion restrictions, some attackers would sabotage the births of women to try to bring them pregnant, she says, and these restrictions still facilitate the pregnancy of women.