Dawn Attride
April 23, 2026
Since the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ended the constitutional right to abortion, Caroline Rouse, MD, said her maternal-fetal medicine practice in Indianapolis has profoundly changed.
Under Indiana’s near-total ban, patients who could previously receive time-sensitive care in their own community are now unable to and/or forced to travel to other states.
"It's one stigma on top of another: abortion is stigmatized, mental health is stigmatized," one expert told Salon
By NICOLE KARLIS, Salon
JULY 19, 2024
As more states move toward more restrictive gestational limits on when a person can have an abortion or not, medical “exceptions” have become the norm. While they often create more confusion than clarity, frequently missing from exceptions are those for mental health. More often than not, the exceptions are focused on physical health only.
According to KFF, 14 states have near-total abortion bans. Many more have restrictions with gestational limits in effect. While exceptions vary, only one state, Alabama, explicitly includes mental health conditions as a legal exception. However, in this case, the exception specifically requires a psychiatrist to diagnose the pregnant person with a “serious mental illness” and document that the person will engage in behavior that could result in their death or the death of the fetus due to their mental health condition.
Continued: https://www.salon.com/2024/07/19/why-do-abortion-exceptions-rarely-include-mental-health/
By inhibiting drug development, economic growth, and military recruitment, as well as driving doctors away from the places they’re needed most, bans almost certainly harm you — yes, you.
By Keren Landman, MD
Mar 20, 2024
Last year in Texas, federal Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk ruled that, based on his read of some very bad science, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) needed to withdraw its approval of the safe and widely used abortion drug mifepristone. He claimed that the FDA hadn’t adequately considered its safety (it had) and that the lack of restrictions on the drug (there were plenty) had led to many deaths and severe adverse events (demonstrably false).
… Restricting abortion means removing women’s control over not only their bodies, but also their futures — and giving that control to someone else. In a nation where sex education and contraception access are already spotty and about half of all pregnancies are unplanned, that act is a population-level assault on women’s autonomy. The result is a psychic wound even to those who aren’t seeking abortions.
Docs in anti-choice states are depressed, scared, and getting worse
JESSICA VALENTI
FEB 1, 2024
A new study shows that abortion bans have created an “occupational health crisis” for OBGYNs in anti-choice states, 93% of whom report that they or a colleague have been unable to follow standards of care because of abortion laws.
Researchers from Harvard’s School of Public Health, Boston College, and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine, report “deep and pervasive impacts” not just on patient outcomes—but physicians’ own health, and on state workforce sustainability.
Continued: https://jessica.substack.com/p/study-abortion-bans-creating-obgyn
Ireland has protected the right to seek an abortion because of the risk of suicide since 1992
By Sandhya Raman
Posted December 7, 2023
While 18 U.S. states have essentially banned abortion for pregnant people facing a mental health crisis, Ireland, which had one of the strictest abortion laws in the European Union until 2018, has taken a different approach.
Ireland has protected the right to seek an abortion because of the risk of suicide since 1992. While more than two-thirds of U.S. states have enacted laws that include mental health among the medical reasons a woman can have an abortion, Ireland protected exceptions for risk of suicide long before the country voted in 2018 to repeal its amendment banning abortion.
Continued: https://rollcall.com/2023/12/07/07irelandsidebar/
Pregnant people were more likely to die from mental health conditions than any other cause, a CDC analysis found.
Nada Hassanein, Stateline
October 24, 2023
More than a dozen states now have near-total abortion bans following the overturning of Roe v. Wade, with limited medical exceptions meant to protect the patient’s health or life.
But among those states, only Alabama explicitly includes “serious mental illness” as an allowable exception. Meanwhile, 10 states with near-total abortion bans (Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Ohio, Tennessee, West Virginia and Wyoming) explicitly exclude mental health conditions as legal exceptions, according to an analysis from KFF, a health policy research organization.
Continued: https://19thnews.org/2023/10/medical-exceptions-abortion-bans-mental-health-conditions/
By Carlotta Dotto and Alex Leeds Matthews, CNN
Sat July 29, 2023
Nearly every state in the United States is neglecting access to maternal mental health care, according to a recent report, and experts fear the situation could get worse as more states severely restrict or ban abortion.
All but 10 US states received either a D or F grade on a number of key measures of maternal mental health risk policies and access to care — including access to therapists, psychiatrists or mental health treatment programs, according to a May report released by the nonprofit Policy Center for Maternal Mental Health, in partnership with researchers from George Washington University. This is the group’s first report grading states on maternal mental health resources and policies.
Counseling, care options for patients seeking truly impartial emotional support can be limited across the U.S.
BY: KELCIE MOSELEY-MORRIS
MAY 1, 2023
Alex D. turned 23 on the day the U.S. Supreme Court released the decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. She was visiting the Omaha Zoo in Nebraska on vacation, riding the chairlift over the rhino exhibit when she saw the news alert on her phone. She was also eight weeks pregnant and needed an abortion.
“I felt hated. And I was like, ‘Nobody knows that I’m pregnant right now,’” she said. “I remember walking around the zoo and also feeling like everyone knew at the same time, like they were all looking at me and like my life was falling apart.”
Unsurprisingly, taking away rights is spurring anxiety on a mass scale
By NICOLE KARLIS
PUBLISHED APRIL 2, 2023
In June 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the landmark ruling Roe v. Wade, thus ending the federal enshrinement of abortion rights in America. Immediately after being overturned, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) warned that such a historic overturn would likely take a toll on women's mental health.
"By dismantling nearly 50 years of legal precedent, the Court has jeopardized the physical and mental health of millions of American women and undermined the privacy of the physician-patient relationship," the APA said in a statement. "This move will disproportionately impact our most vulnerable populations, such as communities of color, people living in rural areas and those with low incomes who may have to travel long distances to receive abortions."
Excluding mental health conditions is likely to have downstream consequences.
Posted March 27, 2023
By A. Alban Foulser, M.A., and Sophie Arkin, M.A., on behalf of the Atlanta Behavioral Health Advocates
The ban on abortions after six weeks following the overturning of Roe v. Wade is an enormous threat to the reproductive freedom and well-being of Americans (Rahman & Fellow, 2022). Many states allow exceptions to abortion restrictions for severe health risks or medical emergencies (Schoenfeld Walker, 2023); however, in states such as Georgia, Nebraska, West Virginia, and Florida, mental health conditions are explicitly excluded from qualifying as such medical emergencies (Tanner, 2022).
This denial of mental illness as a legitimate reason to obtain an abortion is inconsistent with the biopsychosocial model of medicine, which considers the role of mental health, biology, and sociocultural factors such as generational racial trauma, poverty, and food insecurity on physical health (Engel, 1977).
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