Loss of abortion rights linked to 10% increase in mental distress for women

Key takeaways :

• Reproductive age women living in states banning abortion reported a 10% increase in mental distress.
• No associations with abortion restriction and mental distress were observed among women aged 45 to 75 years.

Losing the constitutional right to abortion is associated with a 10% increase in mental distress prevalence among women of reproductive age, researchers reported in JAMA Network Open.

“The Supreme Court of the U.S. ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, issued on June 24, 2022, overturned Roe v. Wade, allowing states to set their own abortion laws, including outright bans,” Dhaval Dave, PhD, research professor in the department of economics at Bentley University in Waltham, Massachusetts, and colleagues wrote. “The American Psychological Association expressed alarm that eliminating the constitutional right to abortion would harm women’s mental health and exacerbate the ongoing mental health crisis in the U.S.”

In this research letter, researchers analyzed individual-level data from the Census Bureau Household Pulse Survey that has been used to study mental health and has information on respondent sociodemographics and residential state. Researchers matched information on the status of state abortion bans from the Guttmacher Institute and travel distance to the closest abortion clinic. Researchers compared changes before and after the leak of the Supreme Court draft opinion in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization and after the Dobbs decision in mental distress women living in states where abortions were or were likely to be banned compared with states with protected abortion rights.

After the Supreme Court ruling, researchers observed a statistically significantly higher prevalence of 10% for mental distress among 83,313 women aged 18 to 44 years (mean age, 32.9 years) living in states with restricted abortion access. In addition, there was an interaction between changes in legal abortion barriers and the association between the Dobbs decision and mental distress, with an increased prevalence of 0.012.

Researchers observed no associations between the Supreme Court ruling and mental distress among the 152,402 women aged 45 to 75 years (mean age, 59.9 years).

“Restricting legal abortion access may be associated with disproportionate outcomes among individuals of lower socioeconomic status and in medically underserved areas, who may experience greater economic and mental health burdens of having unwanted pregnancies due to increased travel costs of obtaining abortions,” the researchers wrote. “Our study suggests that mental health outcomes associated with restricting abortion access may extend broadly, beyond female individuals who have been denied an abortion to female individuals of reproductive age.”