Domestic Abusers Are Using Abortion Bans to Control Their Victims

When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, people warned abortion bans would become another tool for people to abuse their partners. A year later, early data indicates those warnings were right.

In the year before Roe fell, roughly 1,230 people told the National Domestic Violence Hotline that they had endured some kind of what anti-domestic abuse activists call “reproductive coercion,” including being denied an abortion or being forced into one. In the year since it was overturned, 2,442 people said the same. That’s a 99-percent increase.

“When you have laws that come along that are now stripping survivors of their bodily autonomy and right to control their own lives and health—which is exactly what abusive partners are trying to do—it is taking the harm even further,” said Crystal Justice, chief external affairs officer for the National Domestic Violence Hotline. Abusive partners, Justice said, now feel “emboldened and justified in their use of reproductive coercion to control the survivor, which in many cases includes survivors being forced to become pregnant.”

Reproductive coercion occurs when abusive partners use sex as a tool to control, such as through pressuring their partner into sexual activity, refusing to use contraception (or sabotaging it), or denying people access to reproductive health care—like abortion. 

Reproductive coercion is so common in abusive relationships that many survivors don't even recognize it as a form of abuse. The Houston Area Women’s Center, which serves victims of domestic abuse, sexual violence, and trafficking, doesn’t track how many people say they’ve experienced reproductive coercion. But the Center’s housing department is currently working with two pregnant clients who wanted abortions and could not get them, according to Emilee Whitehurst, the Center’s president and CEO. One of them was blocked from even leaving the house, while the other couldn’t leave the state to get an abortion after Texas banned the procedure in almost all cases.

“The most common kind of abuse is economic. So many times our clients—they have no access to the financial resources, even if they’re the ones earning the money,” Whitehurst said. In a 2011 study of 120 people who’d survived intimate partner violence, 94 percent had experienced economic abuse.

“Anything that has a cost, a financial cost associated with it can be very challenging for a person in a highly coercive and potentially violent situation,” she added. Abortions, which can already cost hundreds of dollars, generally become more expensive the later into pregnancy they are performed—to say nothing of the cost of travel to and from a clinic.

Women who sought an abortion and got one reported experiencing less violence from the man involved in the pregnancy, according to data from the landmark Turnaway Study, which tracked women who were turned away from abortion clinics. Women who were denied abortions and forced to carry to term, however, were more likely to be exposed to abuse and violence. (People who aren’t women can get pregnant, but this study specifically examined people who identify as women.)

“When you limit reproductive access, you automatically increase the lethality risks for women because so many of them are incredibly vulnerable when they’re pregnant,” Whitehurst said. “Now, that doesn’t mean that every pregnant woman in an abusive situation wants to get an abortion or wants to terminate a pregnancy. But the failure to offer them that option is truly tragic.”

In the 1990s, Elizabeth Tobin-Tyler used to help women file restraining orders against their abusive partners. 

One of her clients was a woman with a nine-month-old baby. “Her experience of abuse from him had led to this pregnancy,” Tobin-Tyler recalled. The day the woman came to court to file a restraining order, her partner showed up, too—to file a restraining order of his own, in order to claim that he was the real victim and should have custody of the baby. 

“She obviously at this point wanted the baby and wanted to maintain custody of the baby, but didn’t at the time feel like she could escape the violence,” Tobin-Tyler said. “Having children obviously makes escaping an abusive relationship that much harder.”

A day before it overturned Roe, the Supreme Court ruled in a 6-3 decision to strike down a New York law that limited people’s ability to carry guns in public, a move that opened the floodgates to reassess gun restrictions across the country. The coincidences of those twinned decisions were instantly obvious to Tobin-Tyler, a lawyer who serves as an associate professor of health services, policy and practice at the Brown University School of Public Health. As she wrote in an article for the New England Journal of Medicine about the two cases, even then-Justice Stephen Breyer had pointed out that women are five times more likely to be killed by an abusive partner if the partner has access to a gun.

In late June 2023, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a case about whether the government can block people with domestic violence restraining orders from owning guns. This case has the potential to affect more than just abortion patients and domestic violence survivors: Two-thirds of all U.S. mass shootings are linked to domestic violence, according to a study by the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions. 

In his opinion overturning Roe, Justice Samuel Alito argued that the right to abortion is “not deeply rooted in the nation’s history and tradition.” (In fact, until the 19th century, abortion was generally available up until what’s known as the “quickening,” or when the fetus can be felt to move. That typically occurs well into the second trimester of pregnancy.) If the 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court uses the same logic in the upcoming gun case, it will find that rights for domestic abuse victims are decidedly not rooted in U.S. “history and traditions.”

Married women were not legal subjects until the late 19th century, around the same time that “wife beating” became illegal in some states, according to Tyler-Tobin. Enslaved Black women had no legal rights at all.

“We have to read that history through the lens of who was right, who was making the rules,” Tyler-Tobin. “The Court is looking at history through that one lens, which is essentially white men determining the rules for everyone else and not taking into account what was happening to these other populations, including women and people of color.”

The Supreme Court, Tyler-Tobin said, is sending an overwhelming message to people who abuse their partners. 

“The state is not saying that women have reproductive options,” Tyler-Tobin said. “Therefore, as a person who is trying to control another human being, that sends a signal to me that I don’t have to give her those options either.”

The National Domestic Violence Hotline takes calls 24/7 at 1-800-799-SAFE (7233), or 1-800-799-7233 for TTY. If you cannot speak safely, you can log onto thehotline.org or text LOVEIS to 22522.