New research on health care burdens in the post–Roe v. Wade US

New research co-authored by Lori Brown, a distinguished professor of architecture at Syracuse University, was just published by the Journal of Women, Politics and Policy.

Titled "Dobbs, Gender Animus, and the Impact on Abortion Providers," the article is based on interviews with abortion care professionals conducted between February 2022 and March 2023, a time period after the first arguments before the Supreme Court for Dobbs v. Jackson and the time after the court issued their opinion overturning abortion as a federally protected right.

Along with Prof. Brown, the authors include Alesha E. Doan, Associate Dean in the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences at the University of Kansas, and J. Shoshanna Ehrlich, a professor emerita of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at UMass Boston.

The authors make a case that the Supreme Court majority in the Dobbs case refused to acknowledge the impact this ruling would have or understand that banning abortion is "invidiously discriminatory animus against women."

The article is based on 22 semi-structured interviews, lasting 60 to 90 minutes with abortion care professionals. It contributes to existing scholarship on the Dobbs decisions through a focused legal critique of the Court's failure to cognize the connection between opposition to abortion and gender animus. The authors define gender animus as the "curtailment of women's rights and their status as free and equal citizens."

"The interviews we conducted with abortion providers buttress the claim of the dissenting Justices in Dobbs that the Court's conservative supermajority knows or cares little 'about women's lives or about the suffering its decision will cause.'

"In contrast to the distance these anti-abortion justices are 'from the reality American women actually live,' the participants in our study are deeply enmeshed in this reality based on their professional identities and associated intimate knowledge of the first-hand challenges faced by those seeking abortion care in this ever increasingly hostile environment," write the authors.