In the aftermath of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, advocates warned that minors, whose ability to travel across state lines or buy abortion pills online is already constrained, would be among those most impacted by state abortion bans. A new study published in JAMA Pediatrics this week found that two-thirds of girls ages 13 to 17 now live in states that ban or severely restrict their abortion access. Specifically, the study reported that 66% of teen girls in this age range live in states with total bans, bans with severe gestational limits (between six and 22 weeks), and parental involvement requirements for them to access abortion.
“Minors are often targeted by restrictive policies and less able to use routes to abortion care common for adults—traveling to another state or using telehealth—leaving them disproportionately impacted,” Laura Lindberg, a professor at the Rutgers School of Public Health and author of the study, said in a statement. “Without access to abortion, these girls have lost the ability to control their lives and their futures.”
As of December, when researchers completed their data collection, 12 states enforce total abortion bans while 10 have severe gestational limits, including abortion bans as early as six weeks, before many people know they’re pregnant. All 10 of those states require parental involvement for a minor to access abortion; of all the states and Washington D.C. that still protect abortion rights, about half still enforce some parental involvement requirements.
These requirements can include parental consent or notification, unless a judge deems the teen “mature” enough to have an abortion without parental consent—an arbitrary assessment that can be based on their grades and extracurriculars in school. It certainly strikes me as an oxymoron to determine a child isn’t mature enough to have an abortion but is mature enough to endure forced pregnancy, birth, and motherhood, but I digress. Earlier this month, a Nevada court ruled that a state law requiring parental notification for minors’ abortions can take effect after 40 years of being blocked.
While Lindberg’s research, which draws on U.S. Census data from 2020, is the first detailed research into the experiences of young people post-Dobbs, data and anecdotal evidence have long indicated minors are among the most vulnerable demographics harmed by abortion bans. In January, Texas State Health Department data revealed that over the course of 2023, at least 104 minors had to leave Texas for abortion care. At least six of the minors were children under 12 years old. This number, 104 minors, is ninefold from what it was in 2018. Child welfare advocates warned that many of the minors’ pregnancies resulted from rape, while every pregnancy in the youngest age category resulted from rape. But Texas’ abortion ban, like most state abortion bans, offers no exception for rape.
Within days of Dobbs, a 10-year-old rape victim from Ohio had to travel to Indiana for abortion care. A few months later, Ohio doctors reported being forced to turn away at least two other underage rape victims under Ohio’s then-active ban. And in August 2023, Time reported on the story of a 13-year-old in Mississippi who was impregnated by rape and started the seventh grade with a baby.
Minors systematically face far more barriers than adults to access abortion: A recent report by Guttmacher found 66% of adolescents reported that someone had driven them to the facility, compared with 48% of adults. Nearly one in five adolescents didn’t know where to get their abortion, compared to 11% of adults.
Still, anti-abortion lawmakers continue to test new, increasingly restrictive and draconian abortion laws on minors, including legislation that prohibits adults from helping minors travel out-of-state for abortion, referring to this as “abortion trafficking,” as well as legislation to “protect” minors from online information about abortion access. “If you’re banning abortion support for minors, that could result in just stopping them from getting abortion care altogether,” Jessica Goldberg, youth access counsel at If/When/How, told Jezebel in May.
These policies are all justified by citing faux concerns about children’s safety, all while, if anything, placing them at much greater risk. And, we know that targeting minors is just the beginning—anti-abortion lawmakers intend to target all of us.
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