Beyond Dobbs: How Abortion Bans Enforce State-Sanctioned Violence

The Intercept Briefing

The Intercept

Politics, News, News Commentary

4.7 • 6.4K Ratings

🗓️ 15 August 2025

⏱️ 26 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Since the Supreme Court’s landmark June 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturned Roe v. Wade and federal abortion protections, a wave of state legislatures have rushed to impose bans and restrictions. According to the Guttmacher Institute, 41 states now have abortion bans in effect, including 12 with total bans.

“We hear about the endless, supposedly unintentional consequences of abortion bans like rising maternal mortality, child rape victims forced to travel across state lines, increased risk of criminalization, pregnant victims coerced by their abusers, all of that,” says journalist Kylie Cheung, author of “Coercion: Surviving and Resisting Abortion Bans.” “But I very much argue that these aren't unintended consequences.”

This week on The Intercept Briefing, Cheung joins host Jessica Washington to trace the direct line from the Dobbs decision to state-sanctioned gender-based violence and control.

“This is what abortion bans function to do, which is to police and control pregnant people, to feed cycles of abuse, to be this tool in the toolbox of abusers. To enact racial violence and economic subjugation and essentially lower women and pregnant people and people who can become pregnant to this lowered class in our society,” says Cheung. “And that is not unintentional at all.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Intercept Briefing. I'm Jessica Washington. A year after the Supreme Court handed down the Dobbs decision, reversing Roe v. Wade and erasing decades of precedent enshrining the right to abortion, a Nebraska teenager was sentenced in connection to her abortion. Her arrest, which largely hinged
0:22.8	on Facebook messages between the teen and her mother, garnered international attention. In court,
0:29.5	the then 18-year-old, who was only 17 at the time of her abortion, testified that she'd been
0:35.6	in an abusive relationship and was scared of sharing a child with her
0:39.7	abuser. I was honestly scared at the time, she told district court judge James QB. I didn't know what to do.
0:47.9	Despite her pleas, the judge seemingly dismissed her concerns over the abuse. In July of
0:53.7	2023, she was sentenced to 90 days in prison
0:57.2	for, quote, illegally concealing human remains and received an additional two years of probation.
1:04.3	Her mother, who'd helped her obtain the abortion medication, was also sentenced to two years
1:09.4	in prison. The Nebraska teen's case is just one of
1:12.7	countless examples of how survivors of domestic violence find themselves crushed between the
1:18.3	intersection of abortion bans, fetal personhood laws, and the criminal legal system in the post-Dob's
1:24.2	era. Joining me now is Kylie Chung, a journalist covering gender and power,
1:29.6	an author of coercion, surviving and resisting abortion bans, her new book, Connecting the Thru Lines
1:35.4	Between the Dobbs decision and State-sinction gender-based violence and control. Welcome to the show,
1:41.1	Kylie. Yeah, thank you so much for having me. I want to start with this quote in your book that really hit me. You share this quote from Sarah Ainsworth, senior legal and policy director at the Reproductive Justice Legal Organization, if when, how, about the reality of survivors living in states with abortion bans. She said, quote, you live in a state where
2:02.6	you're more likely to be criminalized than the person who's abusing you. It's devastating. That's a really
2:08.5	haunting statement. Kylie, what is the reality for survivors trying to access abortion care
2:14.6	in states with fetal personhood laws and or abortion bans.
2:18.9	That quote definitely really stayed with me too. And there were some lawmakers, I believe,
2:24.5	in Missouri who are trying to raise awareness about how you couldn't finalize a divorce while
2:29.0	you're pregnant in that state. And, you know, I think what people need to know is that homicide
	...

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