CHICAGO (AP) — The weeks after Kanya Harris found out she was pregnant were some of the hardest of her life.
Final exams were approaching for third-year university students. Her doctors told her she had an ovarian cyst and that she was at high risk for an ectopic pregnancy. Her wait times at an abortion clinic near where she lives in Bethesda, Maryland, seemed incredibly long. And because of the state’s abortion ban, she was unable to visit her family in Kentucky.
Harris regularly had panic attacks. She felt like it was all too much, she said.
“My mental health is the worst it has ever been in my life,” said Harris, who had an abortion last May.
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Missouri’s proposal would allow lawmakers to restrict abortions after the fetus is deemed viable, except “when the abortion is necessary to protect the life or physical or mental health of the pregnant person.” become. Similar measures have been proposed in Arizona. In 2022, Michigan voters passed an abortion rights amendment with a mental health exception to viability.
Meanwhile, the proposed ballot language in Arkansas only mentions “physical health” and does not include an exception for mental health. Proposed abortion rights initiatives in other states, including Florida, Montana and Nebraska, do not explicitly mention mental health.
“It breaks my heart to hear about policies that ignore mental health,” said Harris, now 21. “Abortion can save someone’s life, even if they are experiencing a mental health emergency.” Ta.
Most states that ban abortion include exceptions for life-threatening emergencies, but also for “serious mental illness” that could lead to the death of the mother or fetus. Only in Alabama. Lawmakers added the provision after pressure from state medical associations concerned about the high risk of suicide among women.
The law, passed in 2019, was one of the strictest abortion regulations in the country at the time. Exceptions were made in cases of rape and incest, and abortion was considered a serious crime. Alabama began enforcing its ban in 2022 after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, which once granted the federal government the right to abortion.
Abortion bans in at least 10 states – Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Ohio, Tennessee, West Virginia, and Wyoming – explicitly exclude mental health conditions as a possible exception. Others are more vague, allowing exemptions for women’s “life and health” without defining whether mental health is included.
Medical experts say even states that allow mental health exceptions require patients to jump through hoops that may be inaccessible to some people, especially low-income people. . Alabama, for example, requires a state-licensed psychiatrist with at least three years of clinical experience to qualify a mental health condition as an emergency.
On some days, Harris said, she would come home from class and “be overwhelmed and collapse on the floor. I cried every day for two months. But I was facing an abortion ban in my home state.” she said. Harris said she felt reluctant to talk about her experiences with mental health professionals because of the stigma from her doctors.
“People shouldn’t have to jump through hoops and prove their pain to get the care they need,” she says.
According to the CDC, about 1 in 8 women experience postpartum depression. But mental health issues during pregnancy, particularly the psychological trauma of those forced into unwanted pregnancies, are understudied, said Michelle, a law professor at Santa Clara University who studies the effects of abortion restrictions. Overman says.
“These statistics and the stories of women’s suffering really haunt me,” Overman said. “As a society, we don’t have a great track record of treating mental health in the same way as physical health.”
Paul Appelbaum, a psychiatrist at Columbia University, said policies that discount mental health as less important than physical health are putting lives at risk. She said there was also growing evidence that being denied an abortion causes significant psychological distress. This suffering is evident in recent stories of women forced to flee their states or continue their pregnancies despite serious health risks.
“I am extremely concerned about the exclusion of mental health exceptions in these ballot measures,” said Appelbaum, a former president of the American Psychiatric Association. “This is completely cruel and will result in pregnant women suffering and dying in these states.”
Jamie Trevino, a Missouri obstetrician-gynecologist and fellow with Physicians for Reproductive Health, has learned how being denied abortion care can impact a patient’s well-being, including their mental health. He said he had seen it firsthand.
“For my patients, this is a devastating, everyday reality,” she said, adding that she appreciated the mental health exemption in the language of the state’s proposed ballot measure.
Mallory Schwartz, spokeswoman for the Missouri Constitution Freedom Group, said the initiative’s language was “written to ensure that doctors, not politicians, can decide what’s best for patients. ” he said.
Conversely, the Arkansas initiative includes only exemptions “to protect the life of a pregnant woman, or to protect a pregnant woman from disability, physical disease, or physical injury.”
Jenny Diaz, executive director of For AR People, said an earlier version of the proposal included broader exceptions. Initially, she said, “We wanted to make the language of the constitutional amendment as broad as possible, preferably with language that took into account things like mental health.”
But when presented with a proposal that included an exception to “protect the life and health” of the mother, the state’s Republican attorney general rejected that language, saying it required defining “health.”
“That was a signal to us that we had to make a choice,” Diaz said. “And another unfortunate factor is that the majority of voters in Arkansas are less likely to support mental health as a reason for abortion after a certain period of time. We felt that the version mentioned was unlikely to pass.”
Diaz said advocates in Arkansas were concerned that the opponent’s campaign would target mental health exceptions.
The National Right to Life Commission’s model state law on abortion bans explicitly excludes mental health exceptions. These exceptions allow pregnant women to “abort pregnancies with viable children while sort of circumventing these laws,” said Ingrid Duran, NRLC’s state legislative director.
“We specifically exclude the mental health exemption because it creates loopholes in the law and allows the unborn child to suffer due to sometimes treatable, sometimes temporary conditions that the mother may be experiencing. “I saw it put me at risk of death,” she said.
Asked if targeting mental health exceptions would be part of the campaign’s strategy to oppose abortion ballot measures in 2024, she said, “I can’t necessarily say that it will be part of the strategy.” said. Still, Duran said, “It’s heartbreaking to see mental health exceptions like this.”
Santa Clara University’s Oberman said he hopes the anti-abortion movement will “employ strategies that minimize and ignore the mental health consequences of forced pregnancies.”
“Mental health issues in pregnant women are still very much in the shadows and highly stigmatized,” she says. “That clouds our judgment about what a medical emergency is during pregnancy.”
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