Abortion Restrictions As State Violence

Since the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022) Supreme Court ruling in the United States, twenty-one states have introduced abortion restrictions or outright bans that reduce reproductive care access for all pregnant people. This has disproportionately impacted lower-income and racially marginalized women, who are both most likely to seek out abortions and face the greatest structural barriers to access. This paper draws on 150 interviews collected from 2024-2025 with abortion seekers from states with abortion bans who have pursued various pathways to abortion access: traveling out-of-state to clinics; using telemedicine abortion medication; self-managing abortions at home with pills from a community network. As a whole, the interviewees are socioeconomically marginalized, the large majority are women of color, and almost 2/3 have children. This paper analyzes the state violence of abortion restriction alongside the other structural violences abortion seekers face in the contemporary US, and the contradictions women experience in dealing with the state as mothers. Interviewees often expressed disgust at the fact that the state imposes restrictions on abortion access but will not offer sufficient resources for women to raise children in safe and sustained ways. Or as one woman put it, “people out here struggling and the government don’t care ... but they want to tell women what to do with her body!” This paper engages with theories of reproductive justice to analyze the nexus of violent state acts that abortion seekers must navigate in the post-Dobbs era.