Despite Republican assurances that their draconian abortion bans wouldn’t hurt women, a flood of heart-wrenching accounts from across the country prove otherwise. Yet even with that outpouring of stories, plus polls showing broad opposition to the bans and an increase in women registering to vote, it’s still unclear if the issue will be the deciding factor for voters in the midterm elections on Tuesday.
It should be.
This past summer, after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, I started publishing a daily newsletter tracking abortion news, following everything from state bans to stories of women denied vital health care. After months of writing about abortion, it’s clear that stripping this right from half of Americans has had a swift, damaging and pervasive impact.
What happens in the midterms won’t be about Republicans or Democrats, but whether people cast a vote for the continuation of suffering, or attempt to end the anguish that banning abortion has caused.
This isn’t hyperbole. Laws that privilege fetuses over those who carry them haven’t just relegated women to second-class citizenship, they have also led to the denial of lifesaving care in case after case. In affidavits, Ohio health care providers reported having to comfort a sobbing cancer patient who was refused an abortion, and seeing at least three patients who threatened to commit suicide after being denied abortions.
In August, a woman in Texas who was denied an abortion for an unviable pregnancy ended up in the intensive care unit with sepsis. Another Texas woman, pregnant and in failing health, was recently told she shouldn’t come back unless she had a condition as severe as liver failure or stroke. A woman in Wisconsin was left bleeding for more than 10 days after an incomplete miscarriage just days after the Supreme Court’s decision; a doctor in Texas was told not to treat an ectopic pregnancy until it ruptured.
And then there are the stories of women forced to endure doomed pregnancies. Nancy Davis, a mother of three in Louisiana, was denied an abortion even though her fetus was missing part of its head. Chelsea Stovall in Arkansas, who was 19 weeks pregnant when she found out that her daughter wouldn’t survive, was also refused treatment. After traveling 400 miles to get an abortion, she told a local reporter, “I should be able to say goodbye to her where I want to.”
Those are just the adults. This summer, Republicans insisted the story of a raped and pregnant 10-year-old in Ohio was a hoax, and later tried to paint the girl’s experience as a tragic anomaly. In fact dozens of girls in Ohio 14 years old and under had abortions in 2021. In neighboring Kentucky, more than a dozen children aged 14 or younger had abortions last year; two 9-year-olds needed abortions in the past few years. These are victimized children who will now be forced to carry pregnancies, perilous for their small bodies, or leave their home state for care.
In other words: real people, across the country, are enduring real suffering. All of which was predictable and preventable.
In response to the onslaught of post-Roe horror stories, Republican legislators and abortion opponents have claimed that physicians are misreading the laws and failing their patients as a result. It’s a clever move, attacking those who make them look the worst: doctors who see the devastating impact of abortion bans up close, every day. But conservatives have been planning for the end of Roe for decades, and their laws were written with careful consideration.
It isn’t just obstetricians and fertility doctors who fear prosecution, but many types of physicians. At an annual meeting of pulmonologists, a special session was held on how to avoid breaking the law while caring for lung disease patients they may have to advise on ending dangerous pregnancies. Instead of being able to singularly focus on helping sick people get well, these doctors have to worry that doing their job could get them arrested.
The impact of abortion bans goes far beyond horrific individual stories; they’ve had a cascading effect into countless areas of Americans’ lives. I spoke to a young woman struggling with infertility in Tennessee, for example, whose state representative told her that I.V.F. doctors could be prosecuted under the abortion ban there for discarding unused embryos (a common part of the I.V.F. process). “We just want to be parents,” she told me.
Abortion bans have also put birth control access in danger. For years, conservative legislators and organizations laid the groundwork to falsely characterize some forms of contraception as abortifacients. This distortion has already started to hurt women in states with abortion bans: Because of the law’s ambiguity in Missouri, a chain of hospitals there briefly stopped providing emergency contraception, with a spokesperson explaining, “We simply cannot put our clinicians in a position that might result in criminal prosecution.”
At the University of Idaho, the legal counsel advised it against providing students with birth control in light of the state’s abortion ban. Staff members could give out condoms, the guidance said, but only to prevent sexually transmitted infections, not “for purposes of birth control.” Employees were told that even speaking in support of abortion could put them in danger of being arrested and banned from future state employment.
Republicans’ abortion laws have even led to a crisis in care in states where abortion is legal. Doctors are so overwhelmed with patients from other states that some clinics have weekslong waiting lists, which, along with the logistical hurdles out-of-state patients face, has led to later abortions — which Republicans claim to oppose.
Writing about abortion every day feels like drowning, but what keeps me up at night is knowing that, by and large, we are hearing only from the women who felt comfortable enough going to the media. For every one story shared, there are hundreds or thousands more that we will never know about.
Doctors who might otherwise speak up are also being silenced, warned by their employers’ PR and legal teams not to share stories of how abortion bans have affected their work and are hurting women.
As Americans head into midterm elections, they need to consider not what Republicans say about abortion — but what they do, and what their laws have already done.
Conservatives have claimed that they are not interested in targeting individual women. But in the past year, a teenager in Nebraska who authorities say had an illegal abortion is awaiting trial for concealing a death, and an Alabama county jail reportedly kept pregnant women in detention in an effort to “protect” their unborn fetuses from possible drug exposure.
Republicans said women’s lives and health would be protected. They very clearly haven’t been. They said they’d make allowances for sexual assault victims, but states with rape and incest exceptions have language so narrow and vague that they’re near impossible to use.
They said that women’s lives wouldn’t meaningfully change — but women are suffering, every single day.
Republicans running for office have tried to sidestep the issue, dismissing it as unimportant or deleting any mention of abortion from their websites, knowing how unpopular bans have become.
Voters should remember that none of this is accidental. All of this is misery, and hurt is by design. This alone should motivate voters to protect abortion rights.
Jessica Valenti is the author of “Sex Object” and publishes a newsletter in which she writes about abortion every day.
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