OB/GYNs Can Help Patients Struggling with Mental Health Issues Related to Dobbs
August 1, 2025 6 minutes read
By Melinda Young
Suicides among young reproductive-aged women increased by nearly 20% after the U.S. Supreme Court decided in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that women did not have a constitutional right to abortion and states could restrict or ban the procedure, according to new research.1
When anecdotal news reports showed examples of women having traumatic pregnancy experiences in the first two years after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and reproductive rights, one researcher thought there must be some evidence of women’s mental health deteriorating in that period of time.
So, she came up with the idea of studying suicides of reproductive-aged women. And the results are telling: There were higher than expected suicides in July and September 2022 among 15- to 49-year-old women. Among women aged 15-24 years, there were higher-than-expected suicides in September, October, and December 2022 and also in March 2023.1
For women aged 15-24 years, suicides were 19.6% higher post-Dobbs. Male suicides did not increase from pre-Dobbs to post-Dobbs.1
“I first got the idea based on anecdotal news reports of people sharing their experiences of having carried a pregnancy to term when the fetus had conditions that were incompatible with life,” says Parvati Singh, PhD, an assistant professor in the College of Public Health, division of epidemiology at The Ohio State University in Columbus.
Other research has found that abortion bans may exacerbate maternal mortality and severe maternal morbidity (SMM) in the United States. They could cause an additional 2,693 cases of severe maternal morbidity.2 “It’s strange and problematic that we’re not talking about the range of bad outcomes that are happening to pregnant people,” says Silpa Srinivasulu, MPH, PhD candidate and director of programs and evaluation at Reproductive Health Access Project in New York, NY.
“There is no standardized data collection effort, so most reporting and data collection around severe maternal morbidity is from ordinary research studies, discharge data, and hospital-level data,” she adds.
Researchers used publicly available national data, from 2018-2021, on SMM and mortality to estimate changes. They found that maternal mortality and morbidity rates for pregnant people increased in states with abortion restrictions, and this was because of misinformation, fear of criminalization, uncertainties about how laws apply, and changes to the way clinicians and hospitals manage miscarriages, ectopic pregnancies, and other pregnancy crises.2
States with abortion bans are seeing more maternal deaths, especially among Black women, which emphasizes the crisis of racial disparity in maternal mortality, Srinivasulu says. “We live in a landscape of abortion bans impacting healthcare overall, and this is increasing and worsening maternal mortality and morbidity in the abortion-ban landscape,” she adds.
Singh’s interest in the mental health effects of the Dobbs decision was piqued when she read an article about the trauma a woman and her family experienced when she was forced to carry a doomed pregnancy for months.
“There are conditions that, when Roe protected abortion, would have undergone medical termination of pregnancy,” she adds. “There were individual cases of people, and the most compelling one was this article published in Rolling Stone about a couple in Florida who had a pregnancy with a fetus that had Potter syndrome with severe genetic and chromosomal anomalies.”3
“The mental health of women has to be affected,” Singh adds. “That motivated me to look at suicides because the worst outcome of adverse mental health is suicide.” Research shows that the Dobbs decision resulted in reproductive-aged women experiencing higher mental distress, anxiety, and depression.1,4-6
One study found that people who lived in states with trigger abortion bans had a significantly greater increase in anxiety and depression symptoms after the Dobbs decision.4 Another paper found a 10% increase in the prevalence of mental distress among females of reproductive age over the three months after the Dobbs decision.5
Using the Household Pulse Survey, investigators found that people’s reports of mental distress increased significantly after abortion bans/restrictions occurred in some states, post-Dobbs. People reported increased anxiety, worry, disinterest, and feeling down. Increasing mental distress was highest for people living in abortion-restricting states and who were less educated and had fewer economic resources.6
Using public data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Singh collected aggregates of suicide deaths from January 2018 to December 2023 for reproductive-aged women and men. She stratified data by gender. “We know from studies on suicides that the [younger] group has higher rates,” Singh notes. “Using time series analyses, I found that when we take into account natural patterning and how they should behave in undisturbed circumstances and adjust for patterns in men, then whatever is not explained by men and history is called residual,” she explains. “These residuals were high values in certain months after Dobbs.” The residual deaths were specific to reproductive-aged women and did not appear to be related to any other societal-level changes, she says. The data does not show whether the women who died by suicide were pregnant. But the increased suicides are statistically significant, Singh says.
“If you look at policies that induce higher suicide deaths in a population, there are a few, and this seems to be one,” Singh says. “In this case, it is very clear there was an increase on a national level.” Suicide is an extreme outcome, so for that rate to have increased, it suggests there has been a much wider effect on mental health, in general, she says.
“Thousands and thousands of people would have had to have increased mental health problems in order to see this outcome of suicide,” she explains. “There are many pathways where restrictions of reproductive autonomy could lead to suicide.”
Researchers need to dive deeper into hypothesized pathways that lead to suicide among reproductive-aged women, she says. “We need to see what chain of events might have happened, and that would be different for each person,” Singh suggests. “There are so many stories and possibilities.”
The suicide increases surprised investigators, although they had hypothesized the data would show some change. “We were hoping it wouldn’t be as bad as it was in the data,” Singh says. “It was definitely surprising — especially the trend among 15-to-24-year-old women; it was really pronounced for it to be observable at a national level.”
The last time a national event resulted in statistically significant changes in mental health nationwide was during the COVID-19 pandemic, but that was a global infectious disease crisis. “There have been very few policies that elicit such a response,” Singh adds.
OB/GYNs and reproductive healthcare providers can help young women cope with mental stress by providing support.
“They can recognize that there are situations where it can become untenable mentally and create certain conditions that could increase suicide,” Singh explains. “It’s important to recognize patients’ potential for self-harm and to then provide mental health support and reproductive care support to address these adverse outcomes. That’s where we need to focus our efforts.”
Health systems could integrate mental health into the continuum of care and make it easier to access mental health services and improve safety for patients. They can also make it easier for providers to offer these services, such as having group therapy sessions or speaking doctor-to-doctor with psychiatrists to find out the best medication to prescribe for patients, she notes.
“Bringing all of this together can be really daunting, so we need to develop a system that becomes relatively more seamless,” Singh says. “Is there a way to make it easier?”
Melinda Young has been a healthcare and medical writer for 30 years. She currently writes about contraceptive technology.
References
1. Singh P, Crawford A, Crow S, et al. Suicide deaths among reproductive-aged women in the US post-Dobbs: A national time-series analysis. Soc Psychiatry Psychiatr Epidemiol. 2025; Apr 17. doi: 10.1007/s00127-025-02902-7. [Online ahead of print].
2. Srinivasulu S, Heiland FW. How will abortion bans affect maternal health? Forecasting the maternal mortality and morbidity consequences of banning abortion in 14 U.S. states. J Womens Health (Larchmt). 2025;34(6):843-854.
3. Stuart T. Doctors agreed her baby would die 3 months before she was forced to give birth. Rolling Stone. Oct. 24, 2025. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/deborah-dorbert-florida-abortion-amendment-4-1235141637/
4. Thornburg B, Kennedy-Hendricks A, Rosen JD, Eisenberg MD. Anxiety and depression symptoms after the Dobbs abortion decision. JAMA. 2024;331(4):294-301.
5. Dave D, Fu W, Yang M. Mental distress among female individuals of reproductive age and reported barriers to legal abortion following the US Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. JAMA Network Open. 2023;6(3):e234509.
6. Anderson MR, Burtch G, Greenwood BN. The impact of abortion restrictions on American mental health. Sci Adv. 2024;10(27):eadl5743.
OB/GYNs and reproductive healthcare providers can help young women cope with mental stress by providing support.
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