Restrictive post-Dobbs laws don’t just prohibit abortion. They delay or deny abortion care necessary to prevent future health harm, according to new Care Post-Roe research.
The Care Post-Roe research team conducted 36 interviews with healthcare professionals to investigate how abortion bans affect pregnancy care. They identified three categories of patient scenarios where abortion care that clinicians identified as necessary to prevent or reduce future health harm was delayed or denied because the patient was not currently experiencing a health emergency.
Scenarios
In all three scenarios, the patient was not currently experiencing a health emergency, but they would. What their care team did not know was when exactly that emergency would happen—it could be in an hour, in a day, in weeks or even months.
Implications: Barriers to care Exacerbate Existing Reproductive Health Inequities
The absence of a current life-threatening emergency — even when one was near certain in the future — prevented providers from offering abortion care and therefore increased the risk of known and avoidable health harms. In essence, restrictive post-Dobbs laws reorient care for pregnant patients to only allow interventions based on present health and, in effect, prohibit care that will prevent or reduce future harm.
One patient denied an abortion for whom pregnancy was a known serious health risk recounted:
“They told me they couldn’t help me unless I was actively dying.”
Lead author Katrina Kimport, PhD, said:
“We found that there were enormous gaps in terms of what the clinicians wanted to be able to do, what they were trained to be able to do, and what they were able to do under these restrictive laws. And that led to an increase in known and preventable health harms for these patients.”
The article, Not actively dying: An inductive categorization of obstetric cases negatively affected by post-Dobbs abortion bans, appears in Contraception.