The End of Roe Is Having a Chilling Effect on Pregnancy
Polling conducted in August by All In Together, in partnership with polling firm Echelon Insights found that 34 percent of women aged 18-39 said they or someone they know personally has “decided not to get pregnant due to concerns about managing pregnancy-related medical emergencies.” Put another way, poor or unavailable maternal health care post-Dobbs is leading people to alter some of their most important life choices.
For young people, the maternal healthcare crisis is deeply personal. More than a third of young people and 22 percent of young women say they have personally dealt with or know someone who has “faced constraints when trying to manage a pregnancy-related emergency.” And 23 percent of 18- to 39-year-old women say they have themselves or know someone else who has been unable to obtain an abortion in their state — a number almost three times higher than respondents in other age groups.
Perhaps most surprisingly however, these results are similar regardless of whether the respondents are living in states with abortion bans or states without restrictions on abortion access. The consistency between red and blue states suggests that the statistics on maternal mortality and the stories and struggles of women navigating the new normal on abortion access have penetrated the psyche of young people everywhere. The Dobbs decision, it seems, has fundamentally altered how people feel about having families and the calculus for getting pregnant.
In the wake of Dobbs, stories of women enduring horrific medical trauma in states where abortion is illegal have been widely reported. For instance, Carmen Broesder, an Idaho mom, documented her 19-day long harrowing miscarriage on TikTok – including her three trips to the emergency room. While only six weeks pregnant, she was denied access to a D&C (dilation and curettage) surgery because of Idaho’s abortion ban.
It goes almost without saying that this is not good news for the already declining birthrates in the U.S. According to research from Pew, birthrates in the U.S. had been falling since the early 2000s and plummeted during the Covid pandemic. Fertility rates briefly rebounded after the pandemic but now, post-Dobbs, they have dropped again.
"I'm pro life"
Oh cool, so you voted for and support better healthcare? Better pay for teachers? Allotting more tax money to support schools? An increase in WIC? Maternity leave? Paternity leave? Foster system funding? School lunch programs? Childcare/daycare programs? More funding for women's health centers that provide STI testing and contraception? An increase to Medicaid's asset limit of $2k that hasn't changed since 1974? Mental health programs? An increase in SSI for disabled children/parents because no one can survive off $10.9k/year anymore?
No?!? Then shut up, you're pro forced birth, not pro life.
Pro " believe whatever I believe right now"
Late last year, I arranged to get a vasectomy because my wife is amazing, and I don't want to put her through a pregnancy in my state. The urologist who performed the surgery said there had been a significant uptick in the amount of vasectomies he had scheduled because of the recent abortion ruling.
Got mine earlier this year and it was totally worth it. Best ten minute surgery followed by a weekend on the couch ever. 10/10 would recommend.
Cake procedure, super fast recovery and almost no pain in my experience. I recommend it to everyone.
If you’ve got an experienced doc it’s basically just wearing baggy pants and avoiding ball taps for a couple weeks. Mine did ten or fifteen a week and I barely felt a thing. If the pain is keeping anyone from doing it they should reconsider.
Before I had it done I was told all sorts of horror stories by people who hadn't had a vasectomy but "knew a guy who did, and it was horrible, trust me bro". The surgery was literally painless. I laid in bed all day playing Factorio on my laptop, and two days later I was basically fine.
I had the same experience but the worst part was the month I had to still use condoms before they verified I was shooting blanks.
Your doctor gave you 10 to 15 ball taps a week?
No, she gave one a week to 10-15 guys. But with a scalpel.
Best decision I ever made!
Frozen peas and lots of TV. Hell yeah!
Imagine growing up in the wealthiest nation on earth, only to die giving birth. That's a real hazard which American women have to consider.
what a sick joke of a country
Republicans hate women.
And people of color, and foreigners, and the poor, and democrats...
I think they just hate everyone
They hate each other too. Republicans who aren't hateful enough are "RINO"s.
The only saving grace of facism is that it inevitably eats itself.
Yeah, but the problem is it's after it gets bored of eating everything else.
Depends on your net worth more than anything.
I'm pretty sure they just hate everyone, including their republican neighbors.
If only we could have seen this coming /s
I remember reading an article a few months after the Dobbs decision that said birth rates were up, and I thought to myself "not for long."
I had my fallopian tubes removed after the Dobbs decision leaked
I did as well AND my partner already has a vasectomy.
I live in a state that's scary-close to fucking with abortions and I am not about to mess with an abortion in this atmosphere if his vas deferens is the tiny percent that regrows together. Not to mention that no human is immune to sexual assault :/
Goddamn, I was so mad that I felt forced to do that.
Two of my friends did as well. A bunch also ran for iuds in case they came for the pill next
I went for a bilateral salpingectomy because I figured if they came after the pill, they were coming after IUDs too.
IUDs still need to come out at some point. That's care that could be denied because of laws.
Sadly yes. Next battleground for sure
I think that was the intended result
Think again. They want birth rates up not down.
They want the faithful to outbreed the heathens.
Nah they just want cheap labor
I mean the unintentional result was soooo badly needed. Everyone should have access to abortion but I'm glad people have the education and understanding to chose life over unwanted pregnancy and possible death.
@deconstruct
When I see articles that include, "goes almost without saying...", that triggers by 'AI generated article' alert.
Seems flawed at first glance since it doesn't look at pre and post roe answers. Birth rates have been on the fall for ages.
"Women are specifically stating that the direct reason they're choosing to delay pregnancy is the fall of Roe creating emergency health concerns."
"I dunno, are you sure you can believe what women say? Did you check the "real" data?"
I do not believe what people say, no, because people are very often full of shit and data should almost always rely on cause and effect, not opinion polls.
What people say is the basis for doing further research. It's how we find out cause and effect in the first place!
Yes. Then publish the facts once you have the facts, not before.
There's nothing wrong with publishing the result on an opinion poll.
When you publish it as an opinion poll, yes. Not when your misrepresent it as something it isn't.
It's an article on politico, not NEJM.
Only pro-birth opinions are important tho. /s
To what end? Should we not publish studies that require additional research? If we don't publish those how will others in the field know to investigate certain areas?
I mean, if you honestly don't want things published until we know all the facts, then science and research will honestly grind to a halt.
That's how this shit works ... Small, iterative steps. It's slow, it's not sexy, but it's worked for thousands of years.
Of course it corrects for the trend. It lowered birth rates because pregnancy is riskier since terminating is no longer an option unless you basically sit through a death panel to determine whether or not it's clear enough that your life is at risk to terminate. Even then, by the time you get to the point where it's clearly a risk to your life, it can produce sterilizing or permanently disabling consequences.
All for the privilege of bringing a human being into the world with no public assistance, who has exorbitant medical costs, childcare costs, education costs, and for whom being unable to provide for them has catastrophic social consequences.
Unless you do a study of before and after data, you have no reasonable basis to make this claim.
Is it likely that roe has an effect in this way? Yes.
Does this "study" show that? No.
Like, the article literally cites evidence against you. Claiming their questions were answered similarity in areas where abortion is legal and there are no extra risks.
From a data perspective, this is trash data that should be ignored.
You wouldn't agree with any data unless it backed your confirmation bias tho. That's the problem here.
Says someone happily pushing clearly flawed arguments because they agree with their opinion.
You've disagreed with everything said without offering data to back your opinion.
That's how I know you're disingenuous.
You want data about how making conclusions about how things were changed by an event without showing what the data was like before the event is flawed?
And again you disagree without offering proof of your opinion.
It's just a neverending loop leading nowhere.
It's almost like there's been a trend across states to limit access to this due to the federal court case. And pregnancy could last longer than the individuals remaining access to this procedure.