Abortion bans may be fueling a ‘concerning increase’ in suicidal thoughts among teen girls

This story was originally published by The 19th.

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Abortion bans may be driving more teenage girls to seriously contemplate suicide — regardless of whether they are pregnant, a new study finds.

Already, teenage girls are at greater risk of serious depression and suicidal ideation, which means considering or planning suicide. Some public health officials suggest the rates of depression may be at crisis levels: Federal data published in 2024 found that the year prior, 52.6 percent of high school girls said they felt persistently sad or hopeless — close to double the share of high school boys who said they felt similarly. About 27.1 percent of girls said they had seriously considered suicide, compared to 14.1 percent of boys. The federal data doesn’t account for nonbinary students.

Now, a new study published last week in JAMA Psychiatry, suggests that abortion bans — which have already been linked to higher rates of infant mortality and pregnancy complications, including pregnancy-related death — could be making things worse, with teen girls in states with bans experiencing higher rates of suicidal ideation than those in states without.

“There is this very concerning increase that is unique and specific among adolescent females in ban states. We need to pay more attention to what’s going on with them,” said Wendy Sheldon, the paper’s lead author and a scholar at the New York-based Verge Research, which focuses on reproductive health. 

Sheldon and her team analyzed federal data tracking suicidal ideation among high school students in 15 different states. The data identified sex but not gender and did not account for whether students were LGBTQ+; about half the students analyzed were identified as female and half as male. Researchers looked at data from 2017 to 2023. During that period, five of the states implemented near-total abortions bans; the remaining 10 did not. 

The researchers found that in states with strict abortion bans, the share of girls who reported suicidal ideation increased, and in states without bans it declined — resulting in a total difference of 4.3 percentage points between states with and without abortion bans. The researchers did not find any relationship between abortion bans and suicidal ideation among boys. Though the study also found a possible relationship between abortion bans and suicide attempts among teen girls, the results were not statistically significant. 

An increase of this size is substantial,  Sheldon said. “I think it’s really unprecedented here in the U.S. and probably elsewhere, too, that we lost a right — our rights have been rolled back.”

The findings suggest that bans’ health consequences radiate well beyond immediate abortion access.

“These policies clearly impact a broader population,” said Dr. Vanessa Dalton, an OBGYN and professor who has studied the mental health consequences of abortion law, and who was not involved in this study. “It’s not just an unrealized wanted abortion. It’s living in the context of this, amongst many other policies, in particular for women or the LGBTQ+ community — that those policies say things about you as a human being and what your value is.”

Researchers have for years found links between abortion restrictions and mental illness — especially for women and girls. 

A 2024 paper looking at anxiety and depression found that women living in states with “trigger bans,” which took effect when Roe v. Wade was overturned, reported spikes in anxiety and depression after the Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling; men did, too, but at a lower level than women. In 2022, another team of researchers looked at the consequences of abortion restrictions even before states had the power to ban the procedure entirely. In that study, scientists found that targeted laws limiting abortion were linked to higher rates of suicide for women between the ages of 20 and 34.

“There’s a potential of loss of autonomy and personal freedom and there’s concerns over the future,” said Benjamin Thornburg, an economist and postdoctoral fellow at Oregon Health and Science University, who led the 2024 paper. “If I had to think about what group might be most affected by, forward looking, ‘what does this mean for my future,’ adolescent girls seem like an acute target.”