The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) published an investigation on their website on December 28, 2022. The investigation in question was intended “to evaluate whether state-level restrictions in access to reproductive care in the United States were associated with suicide rates among reproductive-aged women from 1974 to 2016.” Between December 2021 and January 2022, researchers Jonathan Zandberg, PhD; Rebecca Waller, PhD; Elina Visoki, MSc; and other unnamed researchers compiled and analyzed data from the year after Roe v Wade was implemented all the way through to 2016 for 21 different states.
What they found was that strict enforcement of Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers (TRAP) laws, laws designed to restrict access to reproductive care of many kinds, not just abortion, was associated with a 5.81% increase in the annual rate of suicide over pre-enforcement years. According to the study itself, there have been no investigations into suicide rate before, though other studies have looked into mental health outcomes after an abortion procedure, and others have measured anxiety levels after being turned away from an abortion clinic due to gestational limits, which in some states are earlier in a pregnancy than most people would know they were pregnant.
Given that this is the only study of its kind, JAMA recognizes that there will need to be more investigation into this issue to make a solid declaration of this correlation. Even so, Dr. Ran Barzilay, a researcher that was unnamed in the study’s JAMA article, said, “What causes a person in need of an abortion to be stressed? It’s the loss of this option to do it.” The thoroughness of the study, cross-referencing three different indices and even “using alternative, broader indices of reproductive care access and different age categorizations” to ensure that the results remained significant (they did) illustrate that this issue will need to be investigated further and addressed. Lives depend on our capacity to provide easily-accessible reproductive care.
