When Abortion Is Targeted, Everyone’s Healthcare Suffers
As 2025 draws to a close, we’ve seen many stories rise to the top of our news feeds–attacks on immigrant and LGBTQ+ communities, efforts to suppress voting rights and gerrymander elections, attacks on government workers, and cuts to scientific research and critical safety net programs such as SNAP. With the Affordable Care Act (ACA) subsidies set to expire at the federal level at the end of this year and an unresolved, significant gap in Medicaid funding in North Carolina, access to affordable healthcare has also been on the minds of many. While direct attacks on abortion and reproductive healthcare have been less visible this year, we have seen many efforts to erode access to healthcare broadly that hinge on attacks on reproductive care. As we all know, abortion is healthcare and cannot be separated out without detrimental effects across the spectrum of care.
This past April, we saw the first attack, with the sudden suspension of Title X federal funding to family planning clinics around the country, particularly clinics that offered or counseled for abortion care. We next witnessed a U.S. Supreme Court decision that upheld South Carolina’s discriminatory and dangerous law to withhold Medicaid reimbursement from the state’s Planned Parenthood clinics, simply because anti-abortion lawmakers in the state wanted to attack these clinics to score political points with their base.
This past summer brought us a destructive federal budget reconciliation bill that amplified this tactic nationally, barring any Planned Parenthood clinic in the country from Medicaid reimbursement for at least a year. We then saw this same effort to attack Planned Parenthood clinics in NC in September, demonstrating for North Carolina residents the skewed priorities of our legislative leadership in a year when we are the only state whose legislature has still not passed a current budget. As we end the year with debate over a potential vote in the U.S. Senate on extending the popular and critical ACA government subsidies to help people afford health insurance, we hear anti-abortion GOP Senators already teeing up the vote for failure by claiming they must add onerous and unnecessary restrictions on abortion care in private health insurance, or else they won’t extend the life-saving subsidies.
This erosion of reproductive health care has been happening against a backdrop of more federal and state dollars going to anti-abortion centers that claim to provide medical care, but are really just fronts for anti-abortion ideology, pregnancy surveillance, and public health misinformation. In North Carolina and at the federal level, it’s crystal clear that anti-abortion lawmakers don’t take reproductive healthcare, including pregnancy care, seriously.
Abortion is healthcare, just like contraception, IVF, treatment for STIs, and maternity care. These are not political issues, nor are they rights that should be confined to debates on morality. Since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the federal protections of Roe in 2022, we’ve heard multiple stories of pregnant patients bleeding to death for lack of access to abortion. When the ACA was introduced in 2009, we heard women plead in testimony before Congress that they needed coverage for contraception for their health, and that preventing pregnancy is sometimes also about preserving health. In our society, we have long lived with the narrative that pregnancy is “natural” for all women, and the dangers in pregnancy and childbirth are the “ultimate sacrifice” that men are never asked to make. Centering morality, religious beliefs, and rigid gender norms rather than a person’s health is an erasure of pregnant people’s rights to life and healthcare.
We know banning abortion leads to poorer health outcomes for all pregnant people, not just those seeking abortion care. Advances in abortion and contraception care have led to advances in maternity care and miscarriage management. Attempts to separate the full range of reproductive healthcare from healthcare more broadly leave people at risk of serious health impairments or even death, minimizing how pregnancy, sexual health, and family planning are tightly woven into the fabric of general health. As we enter 2026, a big election year, we must demand that political candidates stop treating reproductive healthcare, including abortion, as political fodder. Our lives and health are at stake.
