In 2023, several years after the height of the MeToo movement’s prominence in the mainstream, I published my book, Survivor Injustice: Domestic Violence, State-Sanctioned Abuse, and the Fight for Bodily Autonomy. My book’s thesis was simple: Contrary to liberal activism that erroneously framed gender-based violence almost entirely as interpersonal acts by abusive individuals, all too often, gendered abuse manifests as state violence; the state independently functions as an abuser, itself, and systematically empowers abusive partners, too. Think: Being unable to leave an abusive partner or family member because you rely on them for health insurance coverage in a capitalist economic system; simultaneously being unable to vote for policy change that might help you escape an abuser, because they won’t allow you to vote; being forced to navigate a legal system that retraumatizes victims who come forward against their abusers, and allows abusers to sue and bankrupt victims for “defamation.”
But perhaps the most overt, egregious form of state gender-based violence has increasingly flared up as an ever-expanding rash since the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health ruling in June 2022: abortion bans. Now three years after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the gruesome horrors inflicted by state abortion bans began immediately and haven’t stopped: case after case of brutal pregnancy morbidities from being denied abortions for medical emergencies; a 10-year-old rape victim forced to travel out-of-state for abortion, and the doctor who helped her harassed and penalized by the state, within days of Dobbs; a 12-year-old rape victim in Mississippi forced to give birth, her family unaware of the state’s vague rape exception, within a year of Dobbs; children of “childbearing age” denied life-saving medications deemed “abortifacients”; pregnant people jailed on suspicion of having abortions; surging rates of reproductive coercion and control perpetrated by domestic partners; an estimated tens of thousands of rape-induced pregnancies in states with abortion bans. In June 2025, the National Bureau of Economic Research published a new study that showed abortion bans have increased incidences of intimate partner violence across the U.S. since Dobbs.
By 2024, as I continued to report on a near daily basis on the gendered violence—state gendered violence—wrought by abortion bans while working as a reporter at Jezebel, it began to feel, increasingly, like I was writing something akin to a sequel to Survivor Injustice: a detailed, focused rendering of state gendered violence, specifically in the form of abortion bans. Thus, the idea for my forthcoming book with Pluto Press, Coercion: Surviving and Resisting Abortion Bans, was conceived.
Too often, the vast consequences of abortion bans—rising maternal and infant mortality; recurring, near-fatal pregnancy complications exacerbated by being denied care; abusers taking legal action against or threatening to call the cops on partners for seeking abortions—are implicitly framed as unintended consequences, consequences that no one, certainly not the anti-abortion lawmakers who have openly attacked pregnant people’s humanity for generations, could have predicted. In Coercion, I argue that these aren’t unintended consequences at all—they’re deliberate acts of state-perpetrated gender-based violence inflicted on women and pregnant people, particularly those with the least resources and agency under capitalism and white supremacy.
This is the explicit purpose of abortion bans: to police and control pregnant people and their reproduction, to inflict economic subjugation and racial violence, even to actively kill pregnant people—by denying or delaying their access to life-saving abortion care, or by entrapping them with their abusers in a country where homicide is a leading cause of death for pregnant people. In the excerpt below, I present a brief case for abortion bans as a tool in the toolbox of abusers to feed cycles of interpersonal gender-based violence, in a country in which domestic abuse is endemic, affecting one in three women and more than 60% of LGBTQ people.
Coercion by Kylie Cheung is now available from Pluto Press.
In 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade with the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health ruling, eliminating the federal right to abortion. This altered if not altogether tore the fabric of society for women and pregnant-capable people—that is, anyone who can become pregnant, including queer and trans people as well as children. But around a decade before this event, in 2013, a New York court issued a foreboding ruling on a controversial custody case. That case, McKenna v. Miller, involved Olympic athlete Bode Miller, who sued his ex-partner, Sara McKenna, for custody after she moved from California to New York for school while pregnant with their fetus. The New York court initially determined that while McKenna, a veteran and firefighter, “did not ‘abduct’ the child, her appropriation of the child while in utero was irresponsible” and “reprehensible.” The court granted Miller custody, ostensibly as punishment for McKenna’s interstate travel while pregnant.
Despite weaponizing McKenna’s pregnancy to sue and retaliate against her, Miller had previously sent McKenna this text when she first revealed her pregnancy to him and asked him to accompany her to an ultrasound appointment: “U made this choice against my wish.” He ignored her text when she told him she was moving to New York. Like so many controlling or abusive men who wield custody battles to flex their power, Miller seemed less interested in parenting than in punishing his ex.
An appeals court ultimately reversed the state court’s ruling before the end of the year. But nonetheless, McKenna presents a chilling example of how the legal system can be, and so often is, used as a tool by pregnant people’s partners to control them. At the time of the legal conflict between Miller and McKenna, legal experts expressed trepidation about the case’s implications for pregnant people’s rights. “Especially with current political pressures to recognize separate legal rights for fetuses, there will be increasing calls on the courts to fault a pregnant woman for moving, to restrain women from living their lives because they’re pregnant,” Sarah E. Burns, the head of the Reproductive Justice Clinic at the New York University law school, told the New York Times at the time. This amounts to reproductive coercion, which occurs when someone tries to control their partner’s reproductive decision-making or punish them for their decisions, often to entrap them in an abusive relationship and punish or exert power over them. Over one in three U.S. women have experienced sexual or domestic violence, which is endemic across the country.
Frighteningly, the McKenna case isn’t an outlier: Across the U.S., an alarming number of states currently restrict or outright ban courts from finalizing a divorce during pregnancy—similarly wielding pregnancy to bind pregnant people to partners they’re trying to leave, and affording men leverage to exert control over them. Texas, Florida, Mississippi, Arizona, Arkansas, and California all have such laws, according to tracking from the American Pregnancy Association from 2024. Texas and California allow exceptions for domestic violence, but these exceptions aren’t explicit in the other states. In Wyoming, Nebraska, South Dakota, Indiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Maine, Delaware, and Hawaii, there may not be an explicit ban on finalizing divorces during pregnancy, but “judges will likely make couples wait until the baby is born before allowing a divorce.”
In February 2024, one Missouri Democrat introduced a bill to allow people to finalize a divorce during a pregnancy; the lawmaker, state Rep Ashley Aune, said she filed the bill because she’d heard from a constituent who wasn’t able to leave her abusive husband while she was pregnant:
In an extensive 2022 report from the organization Pregnancy Justice on fetal personhood—a rising legal movement that recognizes embryos as children with rights, and consequently subjects pregnant people to state policing to protect those rights—the organization warns that for years now, “divorce proceedings have been a site of great contestation” over embryos and pregnancy.
All of this is further complicated in a country where, today, state laws may force someone to remain pregnant against their will, even when this is directly, frighteningly at odds with their safety. This is the same country where the leading cause of death for pregnant people is homicide, often perpetrated by an abusive partner. Close to half of states have enacted total or near-total abortion bans since 2022—in each of those states, a pregnant person trying to escape a violent or otherwise abusive marriage may be trapped, all during a period of intense vulnerability, when intimate partner violence may begin for the first time or escalate to become deadly.
New research from 2024 revealed a direct link between anti abortion laws and a higher rate of domestic violence-related homicide in impacted communities. Specifically, these laws— known as TRAP (Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers) laws—weaponize burdensome, almost impossible requirements to purposefully shut down abortion clinics, ironically citing concerns for “women’s safety.” In reality, the study, which analyzed data collected between 2014 and 2020, found that enforcing just one TRAP law on one clinic led to a 3.4% increase in the rate of domestic violence homicides in that state. The authors of the study noted that in this six-year period, an estimated 24 women and girls between ages 10 and 44 were victims of an intimate partner violence-related homicide that was associated with TRAP laws. Under these circumstances, it’s hardly surprising that a tenth of people who have abortions do so to exit abusive, dangerous relationships; a third have experienced sexual abuse in their lifetime. Abortion bans exacerbate the risk of physical harm all around: At the end of 2022, University of Pennsylvania researchers published a study that showed pregnant-capable people of reproductive age are at greater risk of suicide in states that severely restrict abortion. The study drew on 40 years of data that preceded Dobbs.
In the summer of 2023, the National Domestic Violence Hotline reported that calls involving acts of reproductive coercion had doubled since the Dobbs decision the previous year. In at least one case that the Hotline shared with me for my reporting in Jezebel, one woman living in a state that had banned abortion said her partner stole her birth control pills and impregnated her against her will. In a survey published in 2024, the Hotline found that out of 3,400 respondents, 5% (about 200) of domestic violence victims said their partners threatened to report them to law enforcement if they had abortions, while 5% said their partners threatened to sue them if they chose this course. Access to abortion has always been a pivotal step in safely exiting an abusive relationship—but in a post-Dobbs legal landscape that casts inescapable criminal suspicion on pregnant people’s wide-ranging reproductive decisions, victims can be punished for the very act of trying to protect themselves. In July 2023, a Nebraska teenager was sentenced to 90 days in jail for self-inducing an abortion in 2022 before the Dobbs decision; the teen testified that she’d made this decision to leave an abusive relationship.
Pregnancy has increasingly become a weapon to be wielded against domestic violence victims—and those who help them. Even before Dobbs, Texas enacted a law known as S.B. 8 in the fall of 2021. The law allows Texans to sue anyone who helps someone access abortion care in the state for at least $10,000, opening the door for rapists and abusers to literally profit off their victims’ pregnancies, and harass their victims’ loved ones with costly lawsuits. Already, we’ve seen several cases of legal harassment from abusive partners aimed at women in Texas who allegedly sought and received abortion care. Shortly after the 2024 election, the most powerful anti-abortion organization in the state launched a recruitment campaign seeking men interested in suing their ex-partners for allegedly having abortions.
These ongoing horrors are entirely at odds with the very principle of reproductive justice, which demands that all of us have equitable access to the resources we need to parent or not parent in safe, healthy communities, with full agency over our bodies, health care decisions, and lives. Reproductive justice is an international framework adopted by Black feminists in the 1990s; just as it demands full, universal access to abortion in the U.S., the movement also demands, for example, Palestinian liberation, the ability to be pregnant, give birth, and parent safe from violent apartheid conditions and genocide funded and facilitated by the U.S. The precedent of Roe was never enough to ensure reproductive justice—that’s because, as Dobbs has shown, a rights-based framework is tenuous, especially when decades of compromise and fecklessness from liberal politicians resulted in these rights being perennially stripped back for decades. Still, the dismantling of our reproductive rights has pulled us back even further to the unthinkable. The end of Roe in the United States has upended daily life for pregnant people and survivors, and created new avenues through which the state and abusive figures can collaboratively punish and control their victims.
