Abortion Bans Are Making It Impossible for Advocates to Help Abuse Victims

“To have to say to someone, ‘You live in a state where you’re more likely to be criminalized than the person who’s abusing you’—it’s devastating,” If/When/How’s Sara Ainsworth told Jezebel.

By Kylie Cheung  |  March 26, 2025 | 8:00am
Photo: iStockphoto AbortionIn DepthPolitics
Abortion Bans Are Making It Impossible for Advocates to Help Abuse Victims

In 2007, Erica DuBois learned she was pregnant just two months after becoming cancer-free. And then the abuse began, she recalled to Jezebel. Her partner would invoke religion to justify physically harming her: “He talked about the beatings and violence like a test—if the baby survived, then it was God’s will,” DuBois said. She eventually gave birth to a healthy baby girl, but as a result of these sustained beatings, her first pregnancy was the only one that didn’t end in a miscarriage. She sometimes tried to take birth control pills, but when her abuser found them, he punished her. This violence would only escalate when she inevitably became pregnant. 

Over the course of eight years together, DuBois says she experienced what domestic abuse experts now call “intimate terrorism.” Her partner routinely assaulted, raped, and even trafficked her. The intensity of this abuse would increase when she was pregnant. When he took her to the hospital when she had a miscarriage, or after an especially severe beating, she says he always had some story to explain it, and no one ever asked if she was in danger. 

DuBois didn’t hear the term “reproductive coercion”—when an abuser exerts control over someone’s pregnancy-related decisions—until several years after she escaped. While they were together, his actions kept her pregnant and entrapped, and eventually, because he feared she’d leave him and didn’t want her having kids with anyone else, he coerced her to have a hysterectomy. DuBois, who is Native American, says that health care workers supported the hysterectomy, pointing to her history of miscarriages, without knowing they were caused by abuse. (Black and Indigenous women are more likely to be encouraged by health workers to have hysterectomies than white women.)

About a decade ago, DuBois was able to finally, permanently leave the relationship. She now advocates for domestic violence victims in her community in Texas. But under the state’s total abortion ban, her job has become that much more difficult, if not impossible, in some circumstances. “We’re put in a situation where we have no idea what we can do that’s legal when a victim is pregnant and doesn’t want to be,” she told Jezebel. “It’s heartbreaking.”

The work of domestic violence advocacy workers has never been easy, Sara Ainsworth, senior legal and policy director at the reproductive justice organization If/When/How, told Jezebel. The leading cause of death for pregnant people in the U.S. is homicide, and already, abusive situations escalate when someone becomes pregnant. But now, “between fears for their own safety, or confusion about how these very new, untested laws are going to be enforced,” this work has become a minefield.

How confusing abortion laws are weaponized

DuBois’ abusive relationship turned her into a “zombie,” she says, but her six pregnancies and their young child kept her tethered to him. She relied on an extensive support system—which offered her shelter, advocated for her in medical settings, represented her in court, and helped care for her child—to eventually leave. But “under [Texas’] laws today, you could be stuck with an abusive person the rest of your life,” DuBois said, “and for a lot of advocates, they may feel there’s nothing they can do to help.”

In 2021, Texas enacted SB 8, which allows civilians to sue someone they suspect of having helped someone have an abortion past six weeks for at least $10,000. In 2022, following Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, Texas enacted a total abortion ban that threatens doctors with life in prison. In 2023 and 2024, 11 Texas counties enacted measures that outlaw abortion-related travel on county roads; other states are increasingly floating insidious, so-called “abortion trafficking” legislation to police those helping someone travel for an abortion.

If someone’s community is too afraid of going to jail or facing costly lawsuits, or if victims fear they could go to jail for seeking abortion in the first place, that obviously advantages a victim’s abuser. In June, the National Domestic Violence Hotline published a report on what reproductive coercion looks like since Dobbs: They surveyed over 3,400 domestic violence victims and found 5% (about 200) of respondents said their partners threatened to report them to law enforcement if they had abortions, while another 5% said their partners threatened to sue them if they chose this course. But there isn’t a single abortion ban in the country that explicitly punishes the patient having the abortion.

“Most of the people experiencing criminal and legal threats over their pregnancy, who call our hotline, are also experiencing domestic abuse,” Ainsworth told Jezebel, noting that many callers to If/When/How’s legal hotline don’t realize abortion bans wouldn’t punish them. “That’s not even understood by many journalists or doctors—these laws are very confusing, and there’s this deeply ingrained idea that if abortion is illegal, therefore someone who seeks it or has one is engaging in criminal activity.” 

Ainsworth pointed to other laws that restrict abortion access, like Louisiana’s Controlled Dangerous Substances Act, enacted in May, which criminalizes possession of medication abortion unless one is imminently about to take the pills. It’s the first law of its kind, and legal experts have struggled to predict how it will be enforced: How can law enforcement prove—without wielding invasive tactics—whether someone was actually about to take them? And what would stop an abusive ex from calling or threatening to call the cops on their former partner for owning the pills?

Then, in Texas, there’s the rising threat of litigation abuse from ex-partners. One anti-abortion attorney, Jonathan Mitchell, represented men in several such cases in 2023 and 2024, while the Texas attorney general’s office is reportedly recruiting men to sue their partners for having or trying to have abortions. “The men who are being recruited—many of those men don’t care about abortion, they just want to control or punish their victim,” Ainsworth said. Attorneys for one of the women being targeted by Mitchell warned in 2024 that if Mitchell has his way, “any scorned lover could harass or intimidate their ex … for simply receiving a false-positive pregnancy test.”

Rape exceptions to abortion bans present another area of confusion. Most post-Dobbs abortion bans lack rape exceptions, but if a ban does include one, both doctors and rape survivors report feeling unsure of how to navigate these policies. In February 2024, researchers estimated that in 14 states that had banned abortion since Dobbs, 519,981 rapes were associated with 64,565 pregnancies. In 2023, Tennessee Republicans proposed adding a rape exception to the state’s total ban—with the caveat that those who “lie” about being raped could face three years in prison. South Carolina OBGYN Jessica Tarleton told NPR in October that her state’s ban causes her and patients who are rape victims to feel like “potential criminals.”

“Laws change all the time, court rulings change things all the time, new bills are introduced all the time. Even when laws don’t pass, they enable abusers to make threats that are really believable. It’s so hard to follow everything,” Ainsworth explained. “This requires a steady stream of analyzing and anticipating, then trying to distill that complicated information into public education for victims.”

Domestic violence risk is higher in states with bans

Abortion access and domestic violence have never been separate issues. The landmark Turnaway Study found that people who seek and are denied abortions face a significantly increased risk of long-term domestic violence. Some abortion-banned states, like Texas, Mississippi, and Arkansas, for instance, have laws prohibiting a divorce from being finalized if someone is pregnant. In 2023, the Hotline reported that calls about reproductive coercion doubled in the first year since Dobbs.

Crystal Justice, chief external affairs officer at the Hotline, told Jezebel most states that have imposed total or near-total abortion bans have domestic violence rates higher than the national average, including Texas, Oklahoma, Idaho, and Florida. “The risk is even greater in rural, secluded parts of these states, where access to a doctor or OB-GYN was already limited before Dobbs,” Justice said. Per the Hotline’s 2024 report, a third of respondents said they now lack access to a medical professional focused on reproductive health; some respondents said this access is a lifeline.

Molly Voyles, director of public policy at the Texas Council on Family Violence, told Jezebel her organization found acts of reproductive coercion by abusive partners in Texas occurring at three times the national average rate. “There is undoubtedly a dangerous nexus between pregnancy and domestic violence,” Voyles warned. In 2024, Family Violence Prevention Services, the largest domestic violence shelter in Texas’ Bexar County, told Texas Public Radio they’ve seen a 12% increase since 2022 in clients who are pregnant or have newborns. Three other shelters in the state reported similar data.

An attorney who represents sexual abuse victims in one of the four abortion-banned states mentioned above told Jezebel she lives in a part of her state where the trafficking of immigrants, particularly minors, is rampant, and some of her clients have faced unwanted pregnancies after surviving sexual violence. The attorney, who asked for anonymity so her small, tight-knit community wouldn’t be identified, said laws in her state don’t just ban abortion, but police some actions that help someone access it, including helping young people travel across state lines for care. This has made it difficult for her and her colleagues to decipher what they can or can’t advise their clients without facing the threat of prison: “It was like seeing someone come to you with a really bad cut, and you have a band-aid, but you’re not allowed to give it to them.”

Abortion bans can cost abuse victims their lives

Over 20 years ago, Lynn Stroud became pregnant when her abusive partner ejaculated inside her without her consent, which is a form of sexual assault. He then insisted they get married. She was 20 and still in college, and he was 27. He pressured her against abortion and refused to help her when she sought one anyway. Stroud later learned he had previously impregnated at least one other partner without consent.

About five years into her abusive relationship, which lasted for some time after her abortion, Stroud managed to permanently leave. But he continued to stalk, harass, and make her fear for her life for several years after. “Access to that abortion saved my life,” Stroud said. Like DuBois, she also became a victim advocate and also currently lives in Texas. She agrees that helping pregnant victims of abuse has become all the more confusing under thorny abortion laws, and worries that too many women in situations like hers could become pregnant and entrapped under Texas’ abortion laws—or worse, killed by their abusers.

A 2024 study showed a direct link between laws that shut down abortion clinics (called “TRAP” laws, which stand for Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers) and the risk of intimate partner violence-related homicide. Between 2014 and 2020, the study estimates that 24 women and girls of reproductive age were victims of an intimate partner violence homicide that’s associated with TRAP laws. “I would be surprised if we don’t see an increase in the number of domestic violence homicides during this time, in abortion-restrictive states,” Rita Smith, vice president of external relations at the direct services organization Domestic Shelters, told Jezebel in May. “We’re seeing a cultural shift in what the value of women’s lives is.”

In 2023, Texas resident Harold Thompson shot and killed his girlfriend, Gabriela Gonzalez, after she returned from traveling to Colorado to get an abortion without his permission. Police reports showed he had a history of violence toward her, including punching and strangling Gonzalez. We can’t speculate what would have happened if Gonzalez didn’t need an abortion or if abortion in Texas were legal. But, it’s very possible that leaving the state made her abortion more difficult to conceal.

Between 2017 and 2023, at least 72 Texas women were killed by their intimate partners when they were pregnant or within one year postpartum, Voyles tells Jezebel. In addition to Texas’ abortion laws, the state’s gun laws have also made her organization’s work more difficult. As HuffPost’s Alanna Vagianos wrote in 2024, Texas “has made it easier for a man to obtain a gun to kill his partner than it is for a woman to access abortion care.” (From 2018 to 2022, the number of Texas women who have been shot and killed by an abuser doubled. Firearm-related intimate partner violence situations increased by 47% in the state from 2022 to 2023.)

Emma, an organizer at the Roe Fund in Oklahoma—which has the highest rate of domestic violence in the nation—told Jezebel her abortion fund’s callers are sometimes victims who are completely under their abusers’ surveillance. “It makes it even harder, on top of the ban, when you don’t have control over your money, or a car, or your schedule or location or your mail, or are being watched, cell phone is being watched—that makes it nearly impossible,” she said. Victim advocates sometimes connect their clients to Roe Fund, but Emma says she worries many victims who would otherwise seek abortion may be too afraid of legal risk under the ban to ask their advocates for help. She suspects that the pregnant victims who are referred to her are just a fraction of those who might need help. 

Emma takes all privacy and security precautions when communicating with callers, but says she still constantly struggles with the fear that “I’m making a woman even more endangered—is this phone call or text to them going to create even more problems?” This anxiety has become an indelible, inescapable feature of her advocacy work: “I don’t think people realize how precarious this all is. For some people, you’re basically risking your life to try to make an appointment.”

Ainsworth says she’s heard from Repro Legal Helpline callers who can’t leave their abuser because they share kids, or “were in an abusive relationship for a very short time, tried to get away, but then got pregnant because of birth control sabotage, and now, under an abortion ban, they’re terrified.” She adds that she knew the disastrous impact abortion bans would have on domestic violence victims and advocates who try to help them. “But it’s one thing to know, and another to have to say to someone, ‘You live in a state where you’re more likely to be criminalized than the person who’s abusing you,’” she said. “It’s devastating.”

This was the exact situation DuBois found herself in for eight years of her life. “My daughter is 16 now,” DuBois said. “Sometimes I’ll meet her friends and suspect they might be in abusive situations. I’ll think about what I went through, and I worry that if they got pregnant, there would just be no way out.”

If you or someone you know are experiencing domestic violence and seeking options to safely access abortion care, you can get support from If/When/How’s Repro Legal Helpline here or call 844-868-2812. You can reach the National Domestic Violence Hotline here or call 1-800-799-SAFE.

 
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