Pregnancy Can Intensify Domestic Violence. Abortion Bans Are Making Things Worse.

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When Julianne McShane wanted to report on how some of the most vulnerable women in the United States were dealing with the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, she knew exactly where she needed to go: Tulsa, Oklahoma. Oklahoma is where two realities collide. It is one of 16 states that have banned abortion almost entirely. “And it has some of the highest rates of intimate partner violence nationwide,” McShane said. “People might not realize how dangerous it is to be pregnant in the context of an abusive relationship, and abortion restrictions, obviously, just make that even more difficult.”

McShane wanted to quantify how difficult things were becoming for women in Oklahoma. So, she met up with a domestic violence advocate named Heather Williams. Williams is not exactly a social justice warrior. She’s a former cop. But she told McShane this story about how abortion restrictions have upended her world. Back in the summer, she was called to a local hospital to counsel a woman who had requested a rape kit. She does this frequently; she holds the victim’s hand and tells them what’s going to happen next.

“This woman is in the hospital bed, and a standard part of the forensic exam is to give a pregnancy test,” McShane said. “And so they give her the test, and they inform her that the result is positive. And Heather said that she was frozen initially, and then she just broke down crying.”

Imagine yourself in Heather Williams’ shoes. Because of Oklahoma’s ban, there’s no abortion provider for her to recommend. Oklahoma also passed one of those “vigilante” laws a while back, the ones that allow strangers to sue you for aiding or abetting an abortion. It got tied up in court, but still, laying out medical options—it felt like a risk. It changed how Williams thought about her work.

“I don’t think Heather would consider herself an abortion rights advocate, necessarily. But she sees the survivors that she works with, and she knows that it needs to be an option that’s available to people,” McShane said.

And Oklahoma isn’t the only place where scenes like this are unfolding. “It’s happening all over the place,” McShane said. “And advocates across the country are in this difficult position of not knowing what they can tell survivors, of fearing that if they do give them information, that they could be criminalized.”

On a recent episode of What Next, we spoke about how the new abortion landscape is causing chaos for domestic violence advocates and for victims. Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Mary Harris: Before talking about how the Dobbs decision is impacting domestic abuse survivors in this country, I asked Julianne McShane to lay some groundwork for me. At the top of the show, she called pregnancy dangerous for American women. I asked her why.

Julianne McShane: Homicide is actually a leading cause of death for pregnant people in the United States, which is probably pretty shocking to a lot of people. And researchers say that this is probably due to the prevalence of both firearms and intimate partner violence, and obviously widespread access to firearms in this country is something that facilitates intimate partner violence. Many of the experts I talked to pointed out also that domestic violence tends to start or intensify during pregnancy.

It’s a time of stress.

Particularly if there’s stress about money, if the pregnancy was unplanned—those are things that could drive someone who’s abusive to become more abusive, or to be abusive for the first time. There’s also a paradox. Oftentimes, abusers will actually purposefully try to get someone pregnant to keep them under their control. But then, once they become pregnant and the reality of a future child becomes more clear, abusers can........

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