Introduction
When Evie found out she was pregnant, she was twenty-one and living out of her car in Florida after escaping a physically abusive relationship.
With help from an abortion fund, she drove twelve hours to Illinois for an abortion, where she discovered that she was twenty-four weeks pregnant, too far along for that clinic to perform the procedure.
Shocked, she returned to Florida, only to later fly back to Illinois for an abortion at a different clinic.
Gabriella Gonzalez travelled from Texas to Colorado for an abortion in May 2023.
The morning after she returned, her ex-boyfriend shot her in the head, allegedly because he disagreed with her decision to terminate her pregnancy.
At the time of Gabriella’s murder, her ex-boyfriend was wanted by police for beating and strangling her two months earlier.
Evie’s and Gabriella’s stories are just two of many from the years following the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that exemplify the myriad geographic, economic, and logistical struggles the decision has created for people who need an abortion.
Since Dobbs, thirteen states have completely banned abortion,
criminal prosecutions of pregnancy-related charges have reached an all-time high,
and abortion medication has come under attack.
All these policies pose unique risks to domestic violence survivors. But threats to medication abortion, which accounted for 63% of all abortions in the United States in 2023, are especially destabilizing.
Abortion medication—typically a regimen of two drugs, mifepristone and misoprostol
—is now the primary way that people living in states with total abortion bans access abortion.
Adolescents in states with parental involvement laws and other abortion restrictions have accounted for the biggest increase in demand post-Dobbs.
Anti-abortion activists—and some conservative Supreme Court Justices—therefore view medication abortion as a way of circumventing abortion bans.
After the Supreme Court held that an organization of anti-abortion physicians did not have standing to challenge the FDA’s mifepristone regulations,
the attorneys general of Missouri, Kansas, and Idaho filed an amended complaint in the Northern District of Texas alleging that the regulations violate the FDA’s “legal obligations to protect the health, safety, and welfare of women and girls.”
As of May 2026, the litigation has been transferred to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri, and the DOJ has moved to stay or, alternatively, dismiss the proceedings while it conducts its own review of the mifepristone guidelines.
A similar lawsuit filed by Louisiana was fast-tracked to the Supreme Court after the Fifth Circuit issued a nationwide injunction against the FDA’s telehealth regulations for mifepristone.
As of the time of publication, the regulations were still in place under a stay the Court issued pending further litigation.
States have also used legislation to target abortion pills, with Louisiana being the first state to classify mifepristone and misoprostol as “controlled dangerous substances,” making possession of them without a valid prescription punishable by up to five years in jail and a fine of up to five thousand dollars.
Louisiana has since indicted two doctors, one from New York and one from California, for mailing abortion pills to patients in Louisiana.
While there are few studies on the rate at which domestic violence survivors utilize medication abortion,
the dynamics of coercive control suggest that they have a particularly strong interest in the pills remaining easily accessible. Abortion pills give survivors a way to manage their abortion privately at a time and place of their choosing
and can be mailed to all fifty states.
Medication abortion is a cost-effective alternative
for survivors who might otherwise struggle to surmount the financial and logistical hurdles necessary to travel for an in-clinic abortion.
Survivors are also likely to bear the brunt of criminal enforcement efforts, which have reached a new intensity since Dobbs.
In 26% of prosecutions for self-managed abortions, the case was brought to law enforcement by a partner, family member, or friend, revealing the potential for trusted loved ones to initiate investigations.
As discussed in section I.B.4, manipulating the legal system to harm or control a partner, including by making or threatening to make false reports to the police or child protective services,
is a form of domestic violence. Over half of criminal prosecutions for pregnancy-related conduct also involve investigations by child protective services, which provide information that is then used to initiate or support the criminal case.
Abortion criminalization is therefore particularly dangerous for domestic violence survivors. The more avenues states create for investigating pregnancy outcomes, the more opportunities abusive partners or family members will have to use the legal system as a tool of reproductive coercion. Early evidence suggests that abusers are already “weaponiz[ing] the possible criminality of accessing abortion, or wrongfully tell[ing] a victim that if they do access abortion, they themselves could go to jail, or they’ll report them to the police.”
In one 2023 survey, 5% of domestic violence survivors indicated that their abuser had threatened to report them to law enforcement for “considering or having an abortion.”
For all the havoc it has wrought, Dobbs has also ushered in a new era of the reproductive justice legal movement that is more focused on putting a human face on the painful consequences of abortion restrictions, with patients who have been denied care like Amanda Zurawski
and Kate Cox
becoming household names. But domestic violence survivors’ experiences living under abortion restrictions have largely been missing from this discourse, even as evidence that restrictive abortion laws enable abusive behavior mounts.
While abortion restrictions have had devastating consequences for people of all life backgrounds, crafting a legal argument that centers survivors’ experiences exposes how these laws enable both state and interpersonal violence against pregnant people.
This Note argues that abortion restrictions’ disproportionate effects on survivors can be used to mount new legal challenges to abortion bans under state constitutions’ right-to-safety provisions. Part I lays the foundation for this argument by developing the empirical connection between domestic violence and reproductive justice. Part II summarizes state courts’ existing approaches to assessing challenges to abortion restrictions and explains why these theories alone do not adequately protect survivors’ reproductive rights. Finally, Part III develops right-to-safety arguments grounded in survivors’ experiences with two different kinds of abortion restrictions: early gestational limits with unworkable exceptions and parental involvement laws.