As abortion bans and restrictions proliferated after the fall of Roe, medication abortion, and telehealth abortion care in particular, have become some of the most common and critical ways that people can still access care. In an effort to eliminate these remaining points of access, the anti-abortion movement has launched a campaign of misinformation, junk science, and aberrant policies to try to restrict access to medication abortion.

One dominant narrative currently being advanced by the anti-abortion movement claims that medication abortion must be restricted because of its supposed use in coercive attempts to end a person’s pregnancy without their knowledge or consent. In reality, this narrative is a thinly-veiled effort to justify new restrictions on abortion and bodily autonomy, using paternalistic language about protecting or empowering women. While reproductive coercion is a genuine threat to bodily autonomy, such coercion far more often involves individuals being forced or pressured into becoming pregnant or continuing a pregnancy—not terminating one.

The coercion narrative advanced by anti-abortion extremists is not a good faith effort to address real instances of abuse. Instead, abortion opponents’ co-opting of the term “coercion” obscures the reality that laws restricting abortion access are in themselves profoundly coercive—forcing people to remain pregnant against their wishes. In fact, the anti-abortion movement has historically pushed for a range of coercive policies, from abortion bans to mandatory ultrasound and counseling requirements, to restrictions on which providers people can see for their sexual and reproductive health care. Furthermore, restricting access to abortion has been shown to increase the risk of intimate partner violence (IPV)—abusive behavior that often includes reproductive coercion and which the anti-abortion movement claims to oppose.

The growing use of the coercion narrative by anti-abortion activists is a clear effort to restrict abortion—not to prevent harm. This analysis will break down faulty claims made by the anti-abortion movement and explain what decades of research tell us about reproductive coercion.

Distorting the Reality of Reproductive Coercion

Reproductive coercion refers to behavior (such as violence or threats of violence, sabotaging actions, and other forms of pressure and control) that interferes with an individual’s decision-making around reproduction and reproductive health. It includes forcing or pressuring someone into a pregnancy (or an abortion) without their consent or knowledge and can take the form of interfering with or sabotaging contraception, attempting to impregnate a partner against their will, or injuring a pregnant partner with the intent of causing a miscarriage, among other forms of control and pressure. When perpetrated by a current or former intimate partner, reproductive coercion is considered a form of IPV. Health practitioners, reproductive justice advocates, and domestic violence prevention groups work to prevent all types of reproductive coercion and to support people who have experienced it. Groups like the National Domestic Violence Hotline have resources available to assist individuals experiencing reproductive coercion.

Despite the narrative being pushed by anti-abortion activists, a 2018 systematic review of peer-reviewed research on reproductive coercion concluded that the evidence does “not support the assertion that women are frequently coerced into abortions, but rather, that they are more often coerced into continuing a pregnancy.” Examples of such behavior in the literature include male partners refusing to provide money or transport for the pregnant person to reach an abortion clinic, forcing them to eat the day of the procedure so that it could not be completed, and causing disruptions at the abortion clinic to try to force the person seeking care to leave.

Reproductive coercion and abuse also have a long history in the United States through state-sanctioned atrocities, including the country’s foundational reliance on the trafficking and exploitation of enslaved individuals, the forced sterilization and medical experimentation on Black, Indigenous, and Puerto Rican communities, and injustices that continue to this day, such as the medical abuse of women in immigrant detention centers. Abortion bans and restrictions can also be understood as state-sanctioned reproductive coercion, as they restrict individuals from realizing full bodily autonomy and can force individuals to remain pregnant when they do not want to be.

The anti-abortion movement is distorting the facts and co-opting language around reproductive coercion, using an unrepresentative handful of cases to imply that coerced abortion is a primary threat to the safety and autonomy of pregnant people. In attempting to conflate medication abortion with the threat of “coercion,” anti-abortion extremists are also undermining the term itself—diluting the power and meaning of the phrase and desensitizing the public to real experiences of reproductive coercion.

Exploiting the Coercion Narrative to Restrict Abortion Access

Many recent efforts to restrict abortion through litigation and policy hinge on the allegation that pregnant people are being coerced into taking abortion pills, either through pressure or covert administration of drugs. Whether perpetrated with the intent of reproductive coercion or not, administering drugs to an individual without their consent is already a criminal offense, enforced under varying statutes depending on jurisdiction. The truth is that a wide range of medications and toxins, not to mention guns and other weapons, can be coercively deployed by abusers, and such perpetrators are already liable to civil and criminal charges. Rather than trying to address broader patterns of coercion and violence, anti-abortion activists and policymakers are instead focused on bills to further restrict abortion and prosecute providers, based on a distorted and ideological understanding of reproductive coercion.

Recent litigation attempts to capitalize on the coercion narrative to target abortion providers, particularly shield law providers who offer telehealth care to patients in states where abortion is banned or restricted. Former Texas solicitor general Jonathan Mitchell, author of Texas’s SB8 abortion ban and a proponent of enforcing the dormant 19th-century Comstock Act, is representing two plaintiffs in Texas who allege abortion coercion. Such cases follow an established pattern for Mitchell, who has previously represented several men suing over the abortion decisions of former partners, and has repeatedly attempted to challenge abortion care shield laws in federal court. One of Mitchell’s new cases, which now includes charges under the state’s abortion ban, relies on contentious allegations that the plaintiff’s partner was pressured into an abortion by her estranged husband. (This plaintiff, reporting shows, has previously been convicted of assault and harassment of multiple women.) In the second case, the local police already determined that the coercion claims were unfounded.

Legislative attacks also use narratives of alleged coercion to restrict access to medication abortion care. For instance, Louisiana’s 2024 legislation that classified the medication abortion drugs mifepristone and misoprostol as controlled substances also created a new crime of “coerced abortion”—even though abortion was already criminalized in the state. In Congress, abortion opponents have introduced bills and resolutions that use the framing of coercion prevention to propose further abortion restrictions. In one recent sham hearing, held under the guise of "protecting women," anti-abortion senators quickly moved from claims about reproductive coercion to calls for the FDA to further restrict mifepristone—despite presenting no evidence on how restricting abortion access would further pregnant people's safety.

Abortion Bans and Restrictions Increase the Risk of Intimate Partner Violence

Abortion bans and restrictions have disturbing impacts that extend beyond forced pregnancy: research has repeatedly demonstrated that restricting access to abortion care increases the risk of IPV for pregnant people. There are also strong associations between abortion bans and reproductive coercion itself. In the first year after the Dobbs decision, IPV reports involving reproductive coercion nearly doubled.

A recent study provides causal evidence of increased violence due to post-Dobbs abortion bans, with over 9,000 additional incidents of IPV among women of reproductive age after abortion bans went into effect in their states. Even under Roe, individuals living in states where abortion was restricted were more likely to experience intimate partner violence than those in less restrictive states. Additional research has found that Targeted Regulation of Abortion Provider (TRAP) laws were associated with an increase in IPV-related homicides of women and girls.

Some of this increased violence may be due to abortion bans keeping abusive partners in the lives of women experiencing IPV by forcing them to carry pregnancies to term. The Turnaway Study, which compared outcomes for women who received wanted abortion care to those who were denied it, found that experiences of intimate partner violence decreased for women who were able to obtain abortions and that women who were denied abortion care were slower to end romantic relationships with abusive partners.

Communities most at risk of experiencing IPV are often also disproportionately impacted by abortion bans and restrictions. Research suggests that Black, Latinx, and multiracial women are more likely than white women to experience reproductive coercion, and people living with low-incomes and undocumented individuals are also at heightened risk. Young people are also particularly vulnerable: the National Domestic Violence Hotline saw a substantial spike in calls from teens experiencing reproductive coercion in the first year after Dobbs. All these groups are among those more likely to face barriers in accessing reproductive health care, including abortion care.

Preventing Reproductive Coercion Requires Access to Abortion Care

True bodily autonomy—including the ability to choose whether or not to become or stay pregnant—requires the absence of reproductive coercion in the form of both interpersonal violence and state control. It also entails being able to access the full range of reproductive health services, including contraception and abortion care. Access to these services allows individuals to actualize their bodily autonomy, reduces the risk of experiencing intimate partner violence, including reproductive control and coercion, and helps avert a range of negative sexual and reproductive health outcomes. Policymakers who are interested in the health, well-being and rights of people who can become pregnant should focus on solutions that reduce interpersonal violence and control, not further restrictions on reproductive health care.

The abortion bans and restrictions being proposed as a “solution” to reproductive coercion are in fact methods of state-sanctioned coercion, advanced by anti-abortion extremists. These policies prevent people from making decisions about their own bodies and from seeking essential health care. If anti-abortion activists were genuinely concerned with preventing reproductive coercion, they would follow the recommendations of rigorous research on this topic, expand access to all forms of reproductive health care, and support organizations working to prevent and mitigate the harms of intimate partner violence.