On June 3, the National Domestic Violence Hotline and the pro-abortion legal advocacy group If/When/How published a Reproductive Coercion and Abuse Report. It details the results of a survey conducted on the National Domestic Violence Hotline’s website between October and December of 2023, in which 3,431 anonymous individuals participated.
The report’s authors claim that it demonstrates that “reproductive coercion is… enabled by state restrictions on reproductive healthcare.” Similarly, HuffPost claimed that the report “highlights the connection between abortion access and intimate partner violence since the Supreme Court repealed federal abortion protections two years ago.”
In reality, the report fails to achieve either of those things and is actually just more pseudoscience crafted for the sole purpose of advancing a pro-abortion agenda.
Location, location, location
Significant state-level legal restrictions on abortion were not possible prior to the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade in June of 2022. Over the course of the approximately two years since that decision, many states have enacted significant legal protections for preborn children.
However, nowhere in this report’s extensive laundry list of sundry statistics related to what the authors term “reproductive coercion and abuse” are any data provided regarding the home states of survey respondents; it doesn’t provide any information regarding the actual legal status of abortion in respondents’ home states, or even the respondents’ perceptions of what their local abortion-related laws might be.
In fact, the researchers state, “All responses were anonymous, and we collected no identifying information,” although they did collect demographic data on ethnicity and sexual orientation. They additionally claimed the survey was “national,” yet it was online, potentially allowing for users outside the United States to answer as well. The researchers gave almost no information at all about their methodology, and do not mention how they selected participants (or even whether respondents were subjected to any kind of screening whatsoever).
Ultimately, this report fails to connect the experiences of respondents, many of which are admittedly tragic, to the abortion-related state laws which are supposedly applicable to those respondents.
In other words, it shows no correlation whatsoever between “reproductive coercion and abuse” and state-level legal protections for preborn children. For all we know, every person who responded to this survey could be living in states like California, which has enacted extensive legislation designed to promote and protect abortion.
Outside of time
What’s more, although the report has what might be considered an impressive collection of statistics collected during a post-Dobbs period — a period in which many states did, in fact, have pro-life legal protections in place — it doesn’t even attempt to compare those numbers to a pre-Dobbs period. Consequently, it fails to show that Dobbs and/or specific pro-life laws had any impact of any kind on the statistics it reports.
The authors claim to prove that state-level pro-life laws sanction “reproductive coercion.” But because the report fails to show any kind of change in the prevalence of “reproductive coercion” since Dobbs, this claim is roughly akin to saying, “During the Covid lockdowns, 54% of women reported making attempts to get pregnant. Obviously, lockdowns increased women’s desire for children.” But without telling us the rate of attempted pregnancy prior to or following the lockdowns, claiming lockdowns had any effect on women’s desire to become pregnant is completely nonsensical, because it is unsupported by the available evidence.
Likewise, due to an absence of comparison data, this report’s claim to demonstrate that pro-life state laws “enable” anything that might be termed “reproductive coercion” fall completely flat.
Exacerbating this problem is the fact that the incidents reported by survey respondents were not temporally limited in any way – they could have happened before Dobbs, after Dobbs, or even prior to Roe v. Wade. At least one anecdote quoted in the report happened over 20 years ago, according to the respondent’s own words.
Misrepresenting its own data
Many of the report’s statistics have absolutely nothing to do with pro-life laws, or even with abortion. Of those that do, the numbers would seem to indicate that it is more common for women to be pressured or forced into having an abortion than it is for them to be dissuaded or prevented from doing so.
The report states that “13% of respondents said their current or former partner pressured or forced them to terminate a pregnancy,” and that “13% of respondents said their current or former partner used or threatened violence while they were pregnant, with the intention of ending the pregnancy.”
By contrast, according to the report, “7% said their current or former partner prevented them from using medication abortion [the abortion pill] to have an abortion,” and “9% of the respondents said their current or former partner used or threatened violence if they wanted to or were trying to terminate a pregnancy.”
So, by its own data, the report shows that it is more common for abusive partners to push or even violently force abortion upon women than it is for them to interfere with it.
Likewise, the percentage of survey respondents reporting anti-abortion coercion (between 7% and 9%, depending on specific circumstances) was significantly lower than the percentage of post-abortive women who have reported feeling pressured or coerced into having an abortion in other research. One recent study places this number at 61%; other research has placed it as high as 64%.
Furthermore, although the report urges that “[s]tates must repeal abortion restrictions,” it also reports that 12% of respondents experienced situations in which their past abortions were used against them in some way by abusive partners. It would seem that making abortion more readily available would be anything but helpful to women in that particular situation – yet the report offers no recommendations whatsoever for protecting these women.
There is only one conclusion supported by the evidence provided
This report is an abject failure when it comes to proving its own claims. However, there is one valid conclusion that can be drawn from the evidence it provides: abusers are deviously creative and will employ a variety of methods to mistreat their partners. There are men who employ abuse and control in order to force their partners to abort. And there are men who employ abuse and control in order to prevent their partners from aborting.
Report authors claim abusers can use pro-life laws to further their abuse — but overwhelming evidence demonstrates that abusers often use abortion itself to further their abuse. In the end, abusers are going to abuse – one way or another. The core difference is, when the law protects preborn children, these innocent third parties are less likely to be murdered as a result of that abuse.
In the end, only abusers themselves are to blame for the coercion and abuse they commit — circumstances, legal or otherwise, cannot be justly faulted as the cause of abusers’ actions. Promoting the idea that some outside factor is somehow responsible for an abuser’s actions essentially excuses perpetrators from culpability – and thereby denies justice to victims.
