Domestic Abusers Are Using Abortion Bans to Control Their Victims – By Carter Sherman (VICE) / July 13, 2023
After Roe v. Wade fell, the National Domestic Violence Hotline saw a 99-percent increase in callers reporting that people were trying to control their reproductive choices.
When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, people warned abortion bans would become another tool for people to abuse their partners. A year later, early data indicates those warnings were right.
In the year before Roe fell, roughly 1,230 people told the National Domestic Violence Hotline that they had endured some kind of what anti-domestic abuse activists call “reproductive coercion,” including being denied an abortion or being forced into one. In the year since it was overturned, 2,442 people said the same. That’s a 99-percent increase.
“When you have laws that come along that are now stripping survivors of their bodily autonomy and right to control their own lives and health—which is exactly what abusive partners are trying to do—it is taking the harm even further,” said Crystal Justice, chief external affairs officer for the National Domestic Violence Hotline. Abusive partners, Justice said, now feel “emboldened and justified in their use of reproductive coercion to control the survivor, which in many cases includes survivors being forced to become pregnant.”
Reproductive coercion occurs when abusive partners use sex as a tool to control, such as through pressuring their partner into sexual activity, refusing to use contraception (or sabotaging it), or denying people access to reproductive health care—like abortion.
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