In this reported op-ed, Danielle Campoamor explores why telling all kinds of abortion stories — particularly the mundane — is important in helping achieve reproductive justice.
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In the wake of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v Wade, countless stories of people being denied access to abortion care emerged, the majority focusing on instances of fatal fetal abnormality, rape, incest or catastrophic pregnancy complications.
From a woman in Texas being admitted to the ICU and nearly dying, to a 10-year-old girl in Ohio forced to cross state lines to access care after she was raped, to a mother who says she was told to wait in a hospital parking lot until she was closer to death before doctors would treat her, these stories saturated headlines across the country, and for good reason — people with the capacity to get pregnant losing the Constitutional right to bodily autonomy is, it turns out, deadly.
But by focusing solely on these specific instances in order to highlight the harm caused by the Dobbs decision, we’re missing out on an equally disturbing reality – every single day, countless people who simply do not want to be pregnant are also being denied necessary abortion care. Proving that abortion bans cause long-lasting and possibly life-changing harm does not require harrowing near-death experiences or heartbreaking stories of loss. By focusing solely on these very valid but specifically disturbing abortion stories, the media is telling any past, current or future abortion seekers that they must endure a traumatic event in order for their need for an abortion to be considered “valid.”
“What I see is the media trying to compel people to be compassionate with these extreme stories, but I think I also deserve compassion for my story,” Elizabeth*, 35, tells Teen Vogue. The mother of one living in North Carolina, who asked that Teen Vogue use a pseudonym to protect her privacy, was forced to obtain a medication abortion out-of-state via an abortion collective.
“It was a twin pregnancy that we could not afford,” Elizabeth says. “We're in the caregiving field … we just couldn't afford it. We would have been in poverty … so we decided to get an abortion and end that pregnancy.”
Facing a newly implemented 12-week abortion ban, Elizbeth says her nearby clinic was “at a loss” for how to help her because they may not be able to provide care for her in that 12-week window. Afraid she would surpass the state’s legal gestational limit, she says she “took prescription medications that were not prescribed to me,” which is illegal in North Carolina.
“It felt really infantilizing and disrespectful that I couldn’t get the medical care that I wanted in a timely fashion,” she says. “Being pregnant is not easy. Being pregnant with multiples is certainly not easy when you’re raising a toddler. I just felt violated. It felt brutal, that anyone could make me stay pregnant when I didn’t want to be for any length of time.”
Studies have shown that when a person needs an abortion, for any reason, and they are denied care they suffer in nearly all areas of their life. According to The Turnaway Study, conducted by Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health (ANSIRH) at the University of California, San Francisco, people who are denied abortion care are more likely to live in poverty, more likely to stay tethered to abusive partners, are more likely to experience adverse mental health outcomes like depression and anxiety, and are more likely to experience pregnancy complications.
“Denying any person an abortion is a negation of their human rights, regardless of whether the sex was consensual or the fetus is healthy,” Amelia Bonow, co-founder and executive director of Shout Your Abortion, an abortion advocacy group, tells Teen Vogue. “Those kinds of tragic details [we’ve recently heard in the news] might make a given situation more sympathetic to someone who is uncomfortable with abortion, but let's not conflate what our society considers to be a compelling narrative with the overall moral calculus, which is crystal clear: all forced pregnancy is unconscionable, immoral, and utterly tragic.”
The harm caused by uplifting certain abortion stories over others as more “moral” or “ethically good” is perhaps most obvious when considering abortions later in pregnancy. Commonly, later abortion stories highlighted by the media focus solely on those who have received a fatal fetal abnormality diagnosis, which occur in approximately 2% of pregnancies every year. These stories often center around women in their 30s or 40s who have wanted pregnancies and who received the heartbreaking news that their fetus would not survive.
Yet young people are overrepresented among later abortion seekers, says Erika Christensen, do-director of Patient Forward, a strategy and advocacy organization and creator of Who Not When, which offers education and accurate information about abortion later in pregnancy.
“When the majority of later abortion seekers do not see themselves represented as those who ‘deserve’ the abortion they’re seeking, it is incredibly harmful,” Christensen tells Teen Vogue. “The rhetoric around later abortion is often so toxic, even from so-called ‘supporters’ who trip over themselves to say that ‘nobody is getting a later abortion for a healthy pregnancy’ as if a pregnancy absence consent could ever be ‘healthy.’”
There is no data, according to Who Not When, to support the claim that people only seek abortions later in pregnancy for medical reasons. In fact, there are a variety of reasons why a person may need a later abortion, including not realizing they’re pregnant until after the first trimester, difficulty paying for an abortion earlier in their pregnancy, inability to quickly obtain child care or time off work, or facing barriers to care that push them later into their pregnancy.
“I meet and talk to a lot of people who have abortions later in pregnancy, and what is most striking is how often people who experience later recognition of pregnancy believe their experience is an outlier because it doesn’t fit into their fetal diagnosis narrative,” Christensen says. “The people I've spoken to have even expressed compassion for the people in those stories, but not for themselves or their own situations. They still feel like they have to apologize or feel shame because their reason wasn't ‘good enough,’ and that is heartbreaking.
“When we compromise away access to abortion later in pregnancy,” she continues, “we are compromising on the backs of the already most intentionally disenfranchised, the most under-resourced, and over-policed members of our communities.”
There are so many stories we are not hearing that highlight the horror of the Dobbs decisions – stories that are whispered amongst friends and lead anti-abortion advocates to celebrate a faux drop in the number of abortions in various states — when in reality people are just crossing state lines or obtaining medication abortions outside the confines of the law.
They’re stories of young people boldly and unapologetically choosing their education over a future child; of mothers prioritizing their mental health instead of expanding their families; of LGBTQ+ people honoring their gender identity over an unplanned pregnancy; of people with the capacity to get pregnant deciding their life’s boundless potential matters more than a life that is yet to exist.
When those people are denied care they are also denied their humanity. If the public is to truly understand the breadth and scope of the harm caused by the Supreme Court overturning Roe v Wade, we must focus on their stories, too.
