Abortion Bans are Reproductive Coercion

Part II of How to Talk About Abortion Bans

Aug 11, 2025

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Note: There are many ways to ban abortion besides outright bans. Even if abortion remains technically legal, some legislative restrictions can function as a defacto ban on abortion, especially for vulnerable and disempowered groups. For this reason, this series* uses the words ‘bans’ and ‘restrictions’ interchangeably.

The movement against reproductive health, rights, and justice has long worked to obscure the fact that its “so-called ‘pro-life’ view on abortion is both coercive and grounded in an illiberal political philosophy.”1 But the “pro-life” view invariably holds that “a just society would use the coercive authority of the State to force pregnant people to conform to [the ‘pro-life’] moral and metaphysical worldview and… enforce this conformation through punishment. The State is therefore permitted, indeed required, to coercively prohibit abortion on this illiberal view” (emphasis added).2 “This is the aim of the pro-life movement: to control all reproductive decisions… so that they are made in accord with the movement’s substantive” worldview.3

Movement leaders and activists, of course, employed woman-protective anti-abortion arguments (WPAA) to obscure the coerciveness at the heart of their ideology. It's out job to bring it back out into the light.

How we talk about abortion bans matters.

For years, I was a part of the so-called “Pro-life” movement. I was a true believer in the movement’s promises that it cared about the wellbeing of the pregnant person as much as the “unborn.” When movement leaders said they wanted to “protect women from coercion,” that resonated with me deeply. But it never occurred to me that the “Pro-life” solution to coercion was really just more coercion.

I didn't realize that I was part of an abusive movement built on coercion and force, because I never heard anyone talk about abortion restrictions for what they truly are: reproductive coercion. That's why it is so important for supporters of reproductive justice to speak to the realities of abortion bans. Our words really do have power. Your words have the power to make change.

How to Talk About Abortion Bans, Part II: Reproductive Coercion

Abortion bans are societal-level reproductive coercion wherein the police powers of the State are employed to constrain or destroy reproductive autonomy to achieve broader objectives of social control, undermining reproductive health, bodily integrity, and human dignity.

The United States “has long operated under interlocking, constructed systems of power and oppression.”4 Two of these systems are patriarchy and White supremacy.5

Patriarchy is “a social system wherein male-bodied people dominate, exploit, and oppress female-bodied people.”6
White supremacy is “a social system in which White people overwhelmingly control power and resources, and ideas of White superiority are widespread and continually reenacted.”7

In the reproductive sphere, these two systems of power and oppression manifest as reproductive coercion.8

Reproductive Coercion (RC) is a pernicious form of abuse and violence “characterized by interference in a person’s reproductive health and autonomy as a means of asserting power and control.”9 Reproductive coercion can take many forms, including interference with contraception; forced sterilization or limiting contraceptive options; using pressure, deception, or violence to force someone to become pregnant; forced birth or forced abortions; withholding information about health and healthcare; obstructing access to health services or healthcare providers; attempting to ban services, treatments, or procedures outright; and empowering third parties to impose their views upon others.101112 Because RC involves the “deliberate restriction of options”13 in order to maintain power and control, it necessarily “undermines reproductive health.”14

While people often connect RC with intimate partner violence (IPV), reproductive coercion “within the United States [is] an integrated system of reproductive control” that operates at four ecological levels.12

Societal
Institutional
Interpersonal
Internalized

Adapted from Wartling, et al., An Ecological Model of Reproductive Coercion

Policies, such as abortion-restrictive regulations, “that interfere with an individual’s reproductive autonomy are [] manifestations of coercive intimate partner violence”;15 and “under abortion bans, the lines between policymakers and abusive partners are increasingly blurred.”16 In fact, under abortion restrictions, the State is the abuser.17

Abortion Restrictions are Reproductive Coercion

As noted in Part 1 of this series, abortion restrictions are the exercise of raw, coercive, hegemonic power through governmental force that both *prohibits private actions and *compels individuals to perform private labor *unwillingly, without regard for their wellbeing.

Abortion restrictions are also reproductive coercion at the societal level.

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Societal reproductive coercion - “a long-studied concept in the anthropology of reproduction”18 - is “state control over reproduction”19 through policies that deploy the police powers of the State to “constrain and destroy reproductive autonomy”20 as a means of “achieving broader objectives of social control.”21 Societal-level RC can take many forms, including but not limited to such “withholding information, obstructing access to health services or providers, attempting to ban services outright and empowering third parties to impose their views on others.”22

“Individuals who experience [interpersonal] reproductive coercion at the interpersonal level,” which is linked to higher rates of unplanned/unwanted pregnancies, “are often additionally burdened by” societal-level policies of reproductive coercion, “further compromising their ability to control their own reproductive health and future.”23 While “reproductive health care centers are primary sites of intervention for victims of reproductive coercion,”24 societal-level efforts at reproductive coercion often directly target these vital points of access to help. Through TRAP laws and attacks on funding, countless reproductive health care centers have closed or have otherwise been made inaccessible, especially to the underprivileged, the disempowered, and the vulnerable.252627 “Overall, this system of public policy functions to maintain a stratified reproduction system that pressures for or against pregnancy to the same effect as” interpersonal reproductive coercion and control.28

As “policies that interfere with an individual’s reproductive autonomy,” abortion restrictions are societal-level “manifestations of coercive intimate partner violence.”29

Under abortion bans, not only is intimate partner violence and interpersonal reproductive coercion far more prevalent;3031 the State both enables abusers and itself becomes the abuser.32 The result of this societal reproductive coercion is a “legal climate and political reality… in which abusers and the U.S. government present a conjoined threat to pregnant people and survivors’ bodies and lives.”33

Importantly, societal-level reproductive coercion carried out through abortion bans is an assault on one's very identity and sense of self. When forced to continue a pregnancy against one's will, “a woman loses the ‘authority to construct pregnancy and motherhood for’ herself; she is simultaneously separated her from, and reduced to, her reproductive capabilities. As Professor Julia Hanigsberg has written, ‘taking away women’s ability to control their decision not to become mothers can be severely damaging to their very sense of self, for this denial of decisionmaking divides women from their wombs and uses their wombs for purpose unrelated to women’s own aspirations.’”34

Additionally, in the United States, “gendered and/or racialized power dynamics permeate many efforts to control a person’s bodily autonomy and reproductive health.”35 Recent research indicates that societal reproductive coercion through abortion bans is employed as a means of “using the state to enforce a particular ethnocultural social order.”36 Hence, this societal-level system of reproductive coercion “frequently functions to privilege White [male] control over reproduction and compromise the reproductive control of communities of color.”37

Reproductive coercion through abortion-restrictive legislation is also a means of enforcing patriarchal gender roles and prescriptive behavioral expectations.3839 For example, research links support for abortion restrictions to a desire “to suppress others’ casual sexual behavior.”40

Furthermore, as research shows, governments’ decisions to institute abortion restrictions foretell broader human rights violations,41 especially “future Physical Integrity Rights (PIR) abuses.”42 Abortion bans “directly serve as a testing ground for authoritarian governments” - and for governments with authoritarian aspirations - “to gauge public response and expand their control over citizens’ rights more broadly.”43 Additionally, “these restrictions create greater inequality and societal divisions, weakening support for diversity and tolerance, and undermining collective efforts to resist further human rights abuses.”44 This research underscores how abortion rights are deeply interconnected with broader human rights frameworks and how these rights can significantly impact overall societal well-being and democratic integrity.45

As the above information makes clear:

Abortion bans are societal-level reproductive coercion wherein the police powers of the State are employed to constrain or destroy reproductive autonomy to achieve broader objectives of social control, undermining reproductive health, bodily integrity, and human dignity.

To maintain power and control over people's bodies, lives, and futures, abortion bans use the police powers of the State to enforce coerced pregnancy and birth, working in tandum with abusive partners and family members, exacerbating intimate partner violence and coercion without regard for pregnant individuals’ safety or wellbeing, with the goal of achieving broader objectives of social control.

If your solution to reproductive coercion is more reproductive coercion via abortion-restrictive policies, you're not concerned about coercion at all - or about women.

Your only concern is keeping women pregnant.

Against their wills.

Without concern for their wellbeing.

As I pointed out in Part I of this series, there are non-coercive ways to decrease the number of abortions and help those who wish to parent do so. It matters that opponents of reproductive rights and justice have chosen instead to exercise raw, coercive, hegemonic power through governmental force to both *prohibit private actions and *compel individuals to perform private labor *unwillingly, without regard for their wellbeing.

Abortion bans are reproductive coercion and we need to be shouting that from the rooftops.■

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rePro-Truth

Abortion Bans are Reproductive Coercion

Part II of How to Talk About Abortion Bans

How to Talk About Abortion Bans, Part II: Reproductive Coercion

Abortion Restrictions are Reproductive Coercion

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