Worth the Risk

Last week, the newly confirmed Attorney General Todd Blanche promised to ban mifepristone (the “abortion pill”) in all fifty states. According to The 19th, “When asked about the possibility of enforcing the law to ban mailing of abortion medications, the Department of Justice confirmed that its Office of Legal Counsel, which advises the president and attorney general, ‘is undertaking a thorough review’ of policies and procedures related to abortion.” Over the last several years, abortion opponents have repeatedly warned that mifepristone, which blocks the pregnancy-protecting hormone progesterone and thus terminates a pregnancy, is unsafe. (TL/dr it is not.) So far, the success of these efforts has been uneven. In May the Supreme Court blocked an attempt by Louisiana to restrict nationwide access to mifepristone, but litigation continues.

The anti-abortion movement in the United States has spent the last fifty years trying to convince us that abortion is dangerous to women’s mental and physical health. This effort originated among Catholic and evangelical Protestant abortion opponents who recognized that their movement needed non-religious arguments to win over a broader American public. They pivoted to emphasizing the fetus’s “rights” and to talking about abortion as a dangerous medical procedure. Most recently, their focus has been on mifepristone, leading to the federal government’s pointless “review” of decades of research demonstrating the medication’s safety. The science on mifepristone is clear: it is safer than penicillin and, for a different patient population, of Viagra.

The anti-abortion movement is primed to assail mifepristone on the basis of its supposed health risks because these activists have spent half a century hawking discredited research alleging that abortion damages women’s mental health and increases their risk for breast cancer. Not only are both of those claims false, they distract attention from the real health risks confronting American women today.

As Jennifer Holland explains in her excellent book, Tiny You: A Western History of the Anti-Abortion Movement, the invention of “post-abortion syndrome” was central to that effort:

In 1981, Vincent Rue, a psychotherapist, coined the term post-abortion syndrome during a congressional hearing on “Abortion and Family Relations” and pro-life psychologists David Reardon and Anne Speckhard took up the torch of the abortion-damaged woman. Both Reardon and Speckhard helped develop the diagnosis, arguing that because of “post-abortion stress,” women re-experienced the trauma of their abortion through flashbacks, hallucinations, and nightmares. Radical activist Normal Weslin explained it in more graphic terms: he said women with this syndrome woke “in the middle of the night, screaming, with dragons clutching at her stomach, and seeing phantom babies.” In this diagnosis, anti-abortion activists imagined a new kind of victimhood for women who had abortions, one where their unknowing perpetration of a moral crime led to long-term psychological damage. [pp. 136-137]

Rue’s research is widely discredited.

The trial of Lorena Bobbitt, who severed her husband John Wayne Bobbitt’s penis in 1993 after alleged sexual abuse, nevertheless redirected the public’s attention to this unusual diagnosis. As Sara Dubow explains in Ourselves Unborn: A History of the Fetus in Modern America, David Reardon, the founder of an anti-abortion advocacy group, connected the violent incident to the abortion that John had forced Lorena to have about three years prior to the attack. Reardon, who has an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering and a PhD in biomedical ethics via correspondence course from an unaccredited school, explained that “there was a relationship between having an abortion and high rates of nervous breakdown, substance abuse, violence, and suicide attempts.” He continued: “It takes no leap of imagination to see how a woman, such as Lorena who, on an unconscious level felt that she had been sexually mutilated by her abortion, would, in a moment of bitter passion, attempt to ‘castrate’ her husband.” [p. 161]

No major mental health organization in the United States or worldwide recognizes post-abortion stress syndrome (PASS) as a legitimate diagnosis. A 2024 statement from the American Psychiatric Association sought to clarify the issue:

Myth Abortion leads to “post abortion traumatic stress syndrome.”
Fact No evidence has been found to support the existence of this condition. This purported condition is not recognized as an official diagnosis by either the American Psychiatric Association or the American Psychological Association.

Another false claim is that having an abortion increases a person’s risk for breast cancer. Much as the anti-vaccination movement relies on a few (subsequently discredited) studies when it alleges links between vaccination and autism, anti-abortion groups selectively cite a few scientific studies. The Nebraska Family Alliance, for example, lists an array of health risks associated with abortion replete with footnotes to scientific journal articles. For example:

A 2009 study released by the American Association for Cancer Research revealed that women who have had abortions face a 40 percent greater risk for contracting breast cancer.[27]

Note 27 is for a 2009 study that showed a small but statistically meaningful correlation between induced abortion and breast cancer incidence. But it’s only one study, and others showed no correlation. As the American Cancer Society explains, “this lack of agreement has led researchers to look at the total body of evidence to try to draw conclusions.” [with my emphasis]

For example, expert panels convened by the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) looked at the evidence and concluded that abortion is not related to an increased risk of breast cancer.

More recently, other researchers have re-evaluated the available data and generally reached the same conclusions. For example:

In a study published in 2020, researchers re-analyzed the data from all of the studies on abortion and breast cancer risk published up until 2018. They found that women who’ve experienced abortions did not have an increased risk of breast cancer. They also reported potential flaws in the studies that previously indicated abortion might increase the risk of breast cancer.

A 2018 report from the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine concluded that abortion does not impact a woman’s risk for breast cancer.

Being denied abortion care appears to be far more damaging to a woman’s health than receiving it. The Turnaway Study, led by researchers at the University of California San Francisco, traced the experiences of about one thousand US women who sought abortions, interviewing them every six months over a five-year period. Comparing the responses of women who received elective abortions and women who were turned away, the researchers found that graver health and socioeconomic problems arose among women who were denied the abortions they wanted [emphasis in original]:

The study finds that many of the common claims about the detrimental effects on women’s health of having an abortion are not supported by evidence. For example, women who have an abortion are not more likely than those denied the procedure to have depression, anxiety, or suicidal ideation. We find that 95% of women report that having the abortion was the right decision for them over five years after the procedure.

The Turnaway Study does find serious consequences of being denied a wanted abortion on women’s health and wellbeing. Women denied a wanted abortion who have to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term have four times greater odds of living below the Federal Poverty Level (FPL).

Focus on the alleged harms of abortion distracts our attention from acute threats to American women’s health. The pregnancy-related mortality rate in the United States is between 44 and 70 times higher than the mortality rate for abortion, according to a study released in early 2026 from the JAMA Network Open led by researchers at the University of Maryland and Brown University.

Prior to this study, a commonly cited statistic was that the risk of death associated with childbirth is approximately 14 times higher than that of abortion. This statistic was based on data from 1998 to 2005, and during that timeframe, mortality rates for people with ongoing pregnancies have been estimated to be between 8.8 and 14.5 per 100,000 live births. The current study, using data from 2018 to 2021, found an annual average of 32.3 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births, with the highest rate of 43.9 occurring in 2021.

I often think about claims of harm, risk, and danger as I research and write about the history of sexuality in the United States. Ideological preconceptions and political agendas influence definitions of harm and warnings about where danger lurks. An article in the New York Times earlier this week, discussing a citizen-led effort to track and even damage Flock surveillance cameras, briefly mentioned the implications of these devices for women’s physical safety:

A Texas officer used Flock’s cameras to track a woman across state lines who was suspected of self-administering an abortion. Officers across the country have abused their access to Flock’s cameras, including to track romantic partners, resulting in discipline and termination.

“To track romantic partners” is a polite way to describe stalking. Both examples from the Times article describe attempts to control women’s bodies, whether by limiting their reproductive autonomy or their freedom of movement—not to mention their physical safety. Those risks are all too real.