Disability is a ubiquitous human experience that must be included in our analysis of how abortion bans affect people. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates 1 in 4 adults in the United States have a disability. According to an American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology study, approximately 12 percent of cisgender women of reproductive age in the U.S. experience disability. However, the anti-abortion movement monopolizes discussion at this intersection, centering the conversation on fetuses with congenital disability diagnoses that must be “saved from abortion,” framing this health care as inherently ableist. This ignores that people with disabilities need access to abortion care and how the complications of forced pregnancy can exacerbate existing disabilities and lead to acquired disability.
It is enraging how the anti-abortion movement pretends to be the savior of disabled lives while advocating for abortion bans that can lead to a person becoming disabled because they are denied abortion care. We must discuss how bans impact disabled people, how bans have the potential to create disabilities or worsen existing ones (employing the understanding that “every form of marginalization leads to disability,” as theorized by disability rights and inclusion activist and communications expert Imani Barbarin), and the anti-abortion movement’s hypocritical use of disability likeness while championing these bans.
The Necessity of Abortion Care Access for People With Disabilities
Abortion care is a disability issue, and abortion bans are situated within a broader context of reproductive harm against disabled people. The Hyde Amendment already places a “de facto abortion ban” on disabled people who have Medicaid or other public insurance coverage in 30 states and D.C. With the overturning of a federal right to abortion with Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), 19 states (as of February 2025) have enacted abortion bans, which only aggravate the inaccessibility mandated by measures such as Hyde. Research from the National Partnership for Women & Families shows that more than three million (or 52% of) disabled cisgender women of reproductive age live in the 26 states that have banned or were poised to ban abortion. Approximately 6 in 10 Black disabled women and 6 in 10 Indigenous disabled women live in these states. Ninety percent of disabled people in the South are affected, where access is ever dwindling due to increasing clinic closures. Numerous barriers to accessing in-person care may leave some with only telehealth options, which are not accessible to everyone. Some disabilities hinder travel, leaving limited options for abortion care. Medication abortion may not be advised for people with certain conditions, such as those affecting the liver or kidneys. Indefensible abortion bans narrow avenues for health care for those with disabilities, whose options are ever constrained.
Abortion bans and related legal decisions also impact disabled people who aren’t trying to access abortion care. In states with bans, people undergoing treatment for certain conditions have been unable to access essential prescriptions. Attacks on in vitro fertilization, which is the only avenue to have children for some people with disabilities, also limit reproductive options.
Before Dobbs, disabled people already faced many interlocking barriers to achieving reproductive justice and bodily autonomy. These barriers remain, despite protections that should be guaranteed under hard-fought federal laws. Disabled people who are multiply marginalized (a term coined by activist and scholar Dara Baldwin in 2014), specifically disabled Black, Indigenous, and people of color, are acutely subjected to these harms due to the confluence of racism and ableism and the racist history of reproductive coercion and control.
People with disabilities may be subjected to forced sterilization still permissible under Buck v. Bell (1927), unequal access to sexual education, guardianship, termination of parental rights, and disproportionate rates of sexual violence (often at the hands of caregivers). Numerous obstacles prevent accessing reproductive health services, including contraception and preventative screenings. Discrimination among providers is rampant. In a frequently cited Brandeis study, one participant was told by a nurse that “it was wonderful that somebody like (her) would still want to have a kid.” This routine ableism fuels attitudes that disabled parents are a drain on the state, or will produce disabled children, and are thus undeserving of having families on their own terms. Similarly, people with disabilities have been made to have abortions both in the past and contemporarily. These practices are guided by the continuing influence of eugenics (the pseudoscience that led to population-control movements in the U.S. to produce a society that was white, not poor, and free of pathology) and are rooted in the ableist, paternalistic belief that disabled people don’t possess the competence to govern their bodies and reproduction, nor are worthy of care.
Abortion Bans Can Exacerbate and Produce New Disability
Legal scholar Robyn Powell’s journal article “Disabling Abortion Bans” coalesces research on how the complications of forced pregnancy can intensify disability in some disabled people. Overall, people with disabilities face a maternal mortality rate 11 times higher than that of non-disabled people, as well as a higher risk of morbidities, which include preeclampsia, depression, blood clots, and hypertension. The physiological fluctuations of pregnancy can be profound for those with disabilities affecting the heart, kidneys, immune, or metabolic systems. Patients with psychiatric disabilities and mental health conditions may face new or worsened symptoms or relapse, particularly if they are forced to suspend medications. Pregnancy can compromise movement for those using lower-limb mobility devices. And, for some conditions such as Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, pregnancy could result in organ rupture.
As observed by Powell, under abortion bans, disabled people who are forced to continue unwanted or dangerous pregnancies may face pregnancy complications that serve as a “further disabling event.” Due to ableism, these complications may appear able to be withstood and therefore unqualifying for emergency care under purposefully narrow and unworkable abortion bans, thereby “entrench[ing] ableism in reproductive healthcare.”
More than 40 million of the approximately 140 million people per year who give birth will experience long-term physical and mental health consequences from childbirth. Based on existing research, it was clear that abortion bans would cause deaths, and reporting on maternal mortality spikes and preventable deaths resulting from this legislated harm has proven this so. A study on Texas’ S.B. 8 found the six-week ban “was associated with significant maternal morbidity.” While one cannot assume causation and additional research (unencumbered by political interference) is needed, it is reasonable to suggest morbidities and high-risk complications that occur through forced pregnancy will lead previously non-disabled people to acquire impairments that may be disabling. As a result, abortion bans, which prohibit timely health care for pregnant people and create a chilling effect on all other aspects of pregnancy care, can render those legislated out of receiving care newly disabled. Pervasive racial health disparities due to medical racism heighten these risks for pregnant people of color seeking or needing abortion care. This is the fault of callous lawmakers beholden to extremist anti-abortion lobbying groups who are so against abortion that they would rather risk someone becoming disabled or dying than provide abortion care – all the while neglecting the needs of disabled children and adults in this country.
For instance, we have seen pregnant women requiring emergency stabilizing abortion care die of maternal sepsis, a leading cause of pregnancy-related death in the U.S. For those who are forced to endure sepsis and survive, the ramifications can be disabling. According to Sepsis Alliance, survivors may experience post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), organ dysfunction, chronic pain and fatigue, or even amputation. Survivors may also acquire post-sepsis syndrome, which can lead to long-term physical and psychological effects and cognitive decline. A ProPublica data analysis found that Texas’ ban resulted in skyrocketing rates of sepsis.
In the University of California San Francisco’s Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health and Resound Research for Reproductive Health’s “Care Post-Roe” report, findings indicate the potential long-term ramifications of denied care, in addition to short-term effects, including “loss of fertility and chronic pelvic pain due to infection or surgery, or heart attack and stroke related to uncontrolled hypertension, as well as effects on mental health.” These long-term impairments and medical events spurred by forced pregnancy can, indeed, lead to disability.
The Anti-Abortion Movement Monopolizes Conversation Around Disability While Facilitating Abortion Bans
It is deeply hypocritical, then, that the anti-abortion movement continues to invoke disability to advance its aims while advocating for abortion bans that can lead to disability. By employing a decades-long semantics strategy and “co-opt[ing] the mantle of disability rights” via fetal diagnosis bans, this movement frames abortion as eugenic and ableist while authoring model legislation and defending denial of care.
As discerned by Ms. Studios’ United Bodies host Kendall Ciesemier, “[b]y invoking a story about valuing disability, abortion opponents can connect abortion to the dark practice of eugenics.” This connection is used to provide a reason to criminalize abortion care and build a case that fetal personhood is guaranteed under the Fourteenth Amendment (as evidenced by the proposed national abortion ban H.R. 722). Extremist groups, including the National Right to Life Committee (NRLC), the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists (AAPLOG), Family Research Council, Focus on the Family, and the anti-abortion center (AAC) Care Net, have painted abortion as ableist or eugenic. Legal scholars Mary Ziegler and Reva Siegel trace the popularization of this argument to a 1989 editorial by white, anti-abortion activist Mark Crutcher, founder of the extremist group Life Dynamics. Crutcher’s argument would be cited in U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ concurrence in Box v. Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky (2019), a case partially concerning Americans United for Life’s model legislation for abortion bans based on a fetal diagnosis, where Thomas riffed on the possibilities of abortion “to achieve eugenic goals.” Thomas’ concurrence was deeply ahistorical (eugenicists did not support abortion – preceding 19th-century abortion bans were fueled by racist anxiety over declining white birth rates). Nevertheless, it would go on to be cited by Justice Samuel Alito in Dobbs. Through promoting these arguments, the anti-abortion movement can feign righteousness while hypocritically advocating for abortion bans that can lead to disability.
While pretending to be on the side of disability rights, NRLC authors abortion ban model legislation designed to bring people to the brink of medical distress. James Bopp, model legislation author, is “not convinced there is a problem” with unworkable and ambiguously defined health exceptions and instead blames the risk of impairment on providers placed in impossible dilemmas. To these lobbyists, time-sensitive and perilous pregnancy complications can just “work themselves out.”
Through lawsuits such as Moyle v. United States, Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) puts people at risk for disability by arguing that the federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA) does not guarantee a pregnant person's health (or life) should be protected under Idaho's abortion ban; ADF counsel John Bursch argues that those in need of emergency care can go into septic shock instead. NRLC, again, targets those with mental health disabilities by snuffing out exceptions for mental health emergencies and suicidality risk, while groups like the Thomas More Society paint mental health considerations as gratuitous in a lawsuit attempting to remove Missouri’s Amendment 3 from the state’s ballot. Meanwhile, AACs peddle medical disinformation such as “post-abortion syndrome,” which only spreads ableist stigma toward mental and psychiatric disabilities.
Conclusion
Attacks on abortion do not help build social supports to bolster the well-being of disabled people (whose reproductive options are already restricted) in our ableist world. It is apparent, too, that these bans can significantly endanger disabled pregnant people in need of care. Furthermore, emerging research and reporting indicate that abortion bans may lead to disability in those who were not previously disabled.
It must be emphasized that the anti-abortion movement attempts to portray itself as on the “right side” of the disability community to capitalize on the rift between abortion and disability activists caused by the reproductive rights movement's historical failure to engage with disability and its past and contemporary use of eugenic language that only serves to prop up ableism. It is a manipulation tactic used to further divide these groups. To address the crisis of abortion bans, we must follow the attendant disability justice and reproductive justice frameworks and continue building cross-coalition solidarity.
Recommended Readings & Resources
Due to the extensiveness of this complex topic that cannot be comprehensively addressed in a single written piece, please enjoy the following readings on disability and reproduction and/or disability justice from scholars, researchers, writers, and activists. The following items are by no means an exhaustive list of the work and expertise in this area.
- Dangerous Pregnancies: Mothers, Disabilities, and Abortion in Modern America by Leslie J. Reagan [University of California Press, 7/2012]
- Feminist, Queer, Crip by Alison Kafer [Indiana University Press, 5/16/13]
- Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and The Meaning of Liberty (2nd edition) by Dorothy E. Roberts [Vintage Books, 2017]
- Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha [Arsenal Pulp Press, 10/30/18]
- Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century by Alice Wong (editor) [Vintage Books, 6/30/20]
- The Future Is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes and Mourning Songs by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha [Arsenal Pulp Press, 10/4/22]
- Crip Negativity by J. Logan Smilges [Forerunners: Ideas First (UMN Press), 5/2023]
- Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement by Ashley Shew [W. W. Norton & Company, 9/19/23]
- To Be A Problem: A Black Woman’s Survival in the Racist Disability Rights Movement by Dara Baldwin [Beacon Press, 7/9/24]
- Legal scholar and anthropologist Khiara Bridges’ “The Dysgenic State: Environmental Injustice and Disability-Selective Abortion Bans”
- Legal scholar Melissa Murray’s “Race-ing Roe: Reproductive Justice, Racial Justice, and the Battle for Roe v. Wade” and “Abortion, Sterilization, and the Universe of Reproductive Rights”
- Legal scholar Robyn Powell’s “Confronting Eugenics Means Finally Confronting Its Ableist Roots,” “Disability Reproductive Justice,” “Including Disabled People in the Battle to Protect Abortion Rights: A Call-to-Action,” “Forced to Bear, Denied to Rear: The Cruelty of Dobbs for Disabled People,” and “Disabling Abortion Bans”
- Legal scholar Mary Ziegler’s “The Disability Politics of Abortion” and “Abortion-Eugenics Discourse in Dobbs: A Social Movement History” (co-authored with Reva Siegel)
Please see the following resources and projects that are fighting for disability justice and/or reproductive justice for disabled people:
- Autistic Self Advocacy Network
- Autistic Women & Nonbinary Network
- Collective Power for Reproductive Justice’s Challenging Population Control
- Center for American Progress’ Disability Justice Initiative
- Transgender Law Center’s Disability Project
- Alice Wong’s Disability Visibility Project
- The Anti-Eugenics Project’s "Dismantling Eugenics" 2021 convening
- Health Justice Commons
- National Partnership for Women & Families
- San Francisco State University’s Paul K. Longmore Institute on Disability
- Sins Invalid (Sins Invalid is a disability justice organization "that celebrates disabled people, centering and led by disabled Black, Indigenous, and people of the global majority, and queer, trans, and nonbinary disabled people." The founders of Sins Invalid conceived of the disability justice framework.)
- Sterilization and Social Justice Lab
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank Equity Forward Director Ashley Underwood, Center for Reproductive Rights Senior State Legislative Counsel Lizzy Hinkley, and SRHRJ colleague Rhi Battersby for their direction and guidance on this piece. This blog was inspired by Kelsey Rhodes’ Rewire piece “Why Aren’t Disabled Stories Included in Abortion Ban Conversations?” and Robyn Powell’s journal article “Disabling Abortion Bans.”
For more information related to this topic, please check out our other research and writing:
- Report: “Cruelty and Control: Reproductive Rights and Health Care in the U.S. Immigration System”
- Blog: “The Systemic Targeting of Marginalized Groups by Anti-Abortion Centers”
- Blog: “Profiting Off Pain: Anti-Abortion Centers and ‘Conversion Therapy’ Proponents Use the Same Playbook”