The afternoon my mother first told me I would get my period, we stood under the kind of Texas summer sun that threatened to peel off my skin. I was nine then: my crushes on boys were sexless and based upon who could run the quickest in our PE class. We floated in our slow-leaking inflatable fruit, and my mother told me I would bleed—that it happened so that I could have a baby one day. When we got home, a book sat on my bed: The Care and Keeping of You, with its pictures of vaginas and encouragement that puberty was normal. I was an “early bloomer,” by all accounts, and by the time my mother began to discuss puberty with me, little mounds of flesh were already budding on my chest. I brought the book to school, and my friends and I gathered beneath the swing set to guess what our adult bodies would look like. It happened on...
Since the Dobbs decision stripped Americans of the constitutional right to obtain an abortion, 29 states have passed abortion bans based on gestational duration and 12 have passed total bans (Guttmacher Institute, 2025). Anti-abortion legislators in South Carolina are pushing to become the 13th, with a senate-proposed total ban to be heard in October. If advanced, this bill will exacerbate the region’s already extreme Ob-Gyn care deserts (March of Dimes PeriStats, 2023), threaten providers with imprisonment, and burden an already strained system of reproductive healthcare.
The Current Landscape of Abortion Care in South Carolina
Currently, South Carolina operates under a ban on abortion once cardiac activity is detectable in the embryo or fetus, often occurring around 6-weeks gestation. This means that it is illegal to provide an abortion to a pregnant patient 6 weeks after their last menstrual period (LMP). This is 4 weeks after a pregnancy begins with implantation in the uterine lining and when many may not know that they...
“There is more at stake than just protecting a woman’s choice to give birth.” Former First Lady Michelle Obama spoke of this reality during a Michigan campaign event for Vice President Kamala Harris on October 26th.1 This November marks the first presidential election since the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the revocation of a once-established national right to abortion, an essential healthcare service. The resulting hostile restrictions on abortion and their devastating health impacts have propelled the issue to its current political salience. Restrictions on abortion care are associated with increased maternal morbidity and mortality, with these burdens disproportionately harming Black birthing people.2 Further, a recent JAMA cohort study illustrated the detrimental impact of abortion bans on infant mortality, with researchers identifying an excess of infant deaths in Texas associated with the state’s 2021 abortion ban.3 These restrictions will also exacerbate inequalities and health systems barriers that prevent low-income patients, who are more likely to report an unintended pregnancy, from accessing...
*trigger warning: mention of death Say her name. Frentorish “Tori” Bowie. Dr. Shalon Irving. Tatia Oden French. Kira Dixon Johnson. Yolanda “Shiphrah” Kadima. Amber Rose Isaac. The list could continue extensively. I lead with these women’s names because sometimes they get lost in the horrific statistics that that show a Black women is almost 3 times more likely to die from pregnancy or childbirth related causes than a non-Hispanic white women (Craft-Blacksheare & Kahn, 2023). The maternal mortality rate for Black women in 2021 was 69.9 deaths per 100,000 live births (Hoyert, 2023) with 393 deaths in 2019 alone (Fleszar et al., 2023), and most of these maternal deaths were deemed preventable (Fleszar et al., 2023). Further, Black newborns are over two times greater to die in their first year than white newborns. The role of racism in these preventable deaths is highlighted in the fact that the mortality rate of infants of college-educated African American mothers experience an infant mortality rate that is greater than those of white...
Pro-choice vs Pro-life? The conversation surrounding reproductive health has been trampled by the debate between two movements. It has been obscured by debates of when life begins. It has been convoluted with religious beliefs, political beliefs, and complex obscurities that the people have failed to realize the real focus of this discussion: women and their reproductive freedom. With the overturning of Roe vs Wade, the discussion of reproductive rights and women’s rights have become more urgent than ever. This is not a matter of women’s rights but human rights. Due to the constitutional right to an abortion granted by Roe vs Wade, women have had the law the federal government enabling the freedom to reproductive care but stripping this basic human right to healthcare puts them in more dangerous situations than ever [2]. The advent of this new decision has opened new laws that will soon ban abortion access, birth control and other means of contraceptives. This is a mean...
As the topic of sexual and reproductive health re-enters the public consciousness in America through the overturning of Roe v. Wade, it becomes increasingly important to access American Sex Education, or rather, the failures of it, and how we teach these topics to our most impressionable population, children. The state of sex-education in this country is in shambles. Though the majority of Americans support sex-education in middle school and in high school, what exactly does that education look like? The first and one of the most important things to note about sex-education in the states is that there is no universal regulation of it. Only thirty nine states, plus DC, even have government mandated sex-education [5]. Within the states with mandated sex-education, only thirteen must provide “medically accurate” sex-education [1]. The content of what is covered in sex-education varies widely from state to state, within states that do have government mandated sex-education, it is often left to individual districts to decide...
When having discussions about Roe v. Wade and the consequences of overturning it, it is of the utmost importance that we remember to center the stories and the voices of those that would be most affected by the loss of abortion access. It is often easy to get lost in the big-picture, Constitutional implications of Roe v. Wade being overturned, but the heart of this issue is the people. Some of our most vulnerable and most marginalized populations will feel the impact of Roe being overturned the most, and listening to them and understanding their stories is imperative to movements to preserve abortion access. Through this blogpost, I hope to highlight the stories of real people that need access to abortion services. Adriana was 34 and living in Mexico when she found out that she was pregnant. Abortion was not legal where Adriana was from in Mexico. Adriana knew immediately that she wanted to terminate her pregnancy, but her choices were...
The United States is one of the leading nations in medical advancement and spends a significant portion of expenditures in healthcare and yet, we have the highest rate of maternal mortality (ratio of 57) among developed countries. About 57 mothers die during childbirth per 100,000 birth in a year. Maternal mortality is defined as the death of a mother due to pregnancy and/or childbirth complications [3]. These complications can arise due to a variety of factors including environmental lifestyle, predisposing conditions, risk factors, genetics and socioeconomic factors [1]. Pregnancy complications are likely to arise in women with higher maternal age and those with chronic cardiovascular conditions. Preeclampsia is a condition in which women develop high blood pressure due to preexisting cardiovascular conditions and kidney disease. Black non-Hispanic mothers are 2.5 times more likely to die from pregnancy or labor complications compared to white women and 3.5 times more likely to die than Hispanic women [3]. Why is there a disparity in...
Jonas Swartz, MD, MPH is an OB/GYN and an Assistant Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology. He completed his undergrad at Duke University and then his MPH and MD at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He completed his residency in Obstetrics and Gynecology at the Oregon Health and Science University, followed with a fellowship in Complex Family Planning back at UNC. I had a conversation with Dr. Swartz to understand more about how he became involved in health policy and reproductive health access. “Well, I grew up in North Carolina and did Medical School here, and one of the striking things when I was a medical student was the discrepancy in care during pregnancy for people who were citizens versus non-citizens. And, in particular, thinking about low-income people who use Medicaid.” Swartz described his early medical training and becoming acquainted with the Federal Emergency Medicaid program, which only pays for labor and delivery services for authorized immigrants. He noted that...
Every Wednesday in front of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul, people gather around to demand the Japanese government formally apologize for their forced sexual slavery system during World War II. Even though it has been over 20 years of Koreans raising this issue, the Japanese government has only tried to offer monetary compensation, and has not issued an official apology. The Asian Women’s Fund estimates the number of victims ranges from 50,000 to a quarter million, but the number has remained vague due to incomplete data archives and stigma among victims after the war (1). A few survivors of this sexual slavery system have spoken in front of global leaders to raise awareness: one of them, Hak-sun Kim, delivered her first testimony in 1991. During this testimony, Kim said that when she was seventeen, she was forcibly sent to the Japanese military’s comfort station (a sexual slavery station) in China (2). She resisted, but soldiers threatened and kicked her to be...
