In May 2025, the Missouri Supreme Court ordered the state's total abortion ban back into effect. Doctors who'd been providing care for a few months suddenly couldn't. Women with medical emergencies found themselves in the same impossible position they'd been in before: waiting until they were sick enough to qualify for an exception, hoping they wouldn't die first.
Meanwhile, Texas was reporting a 50% spike in maternal sepsis and a 95% increase in maternal deaths among White women during the first year of its post-six-week ban. Louisiana had just reclassified abortion medication alongside controlled substances. And the Trump administration was reviewing whether mifepristone — used safely for decades — should remain available at all.
These aren't just healthcare stories. They're discrimination stories. And they're feminist stories. Because the fight over who controls pregnancy is the same fight as who gets treated fairly in a hospital, who gets to participate equally in public life, and whether the law can force one group of people to use their bodies in ways it would never demand of anyone else.
Here's the thing about abortion bans: they impose a requirement that exists nowhere else in American law. Reproductive Rights and Bodily Autonomy walks through the comparison. You can't be forced to donate blood to save your own child's life. You can't be compelled to give bone marrow, even if you're the only match. If you initially agree to donate an organ and then change your mind, that's your right. Bodily autonomy is sacrosanct — except when you're pregnant.
Abortion bans require pregnant people to provide continuous bodily support under threat of criminal penalty, while no comparable law forces anyone — including parents — to donate blood, bone marrow, or organs to their dying children. That's not a medical policy. That's a legal carve-out that applies exclusively to people capable of pregnancy.
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court saw it clearly. In 2024, it ruled that banning Medicaid funding for abortion discriminates against women, violating the state's Equal Rights Amendment. New Mexico's high court reached the same conclusion back in 1998. The logic is straightforward: if a burden falls exclusively on one sex, and that burden doesn't exist anywhere else in law, you're looking at discrimination.
Liberal and radical feminists disagree on plenty, but they converge on this: women's oppression is structural, not accidental. What is Feminism? digs into the split. Liberal feminism works within existing systems — courts, legislatures, institutions — to secure legal protections and equal access. It's the tradition that brought us voting rights, workplace discrimination laws, and Title IX. Liberal feminism seeks gradual social progress and equality on the basis of liberal democracy rather than a revolution or radical reordering of society.
Radical feminism takes a harder line. It identifies patriarchy, or male domination, as the fundamental root of all women's oppression, calling for a revolutionary restructuring of society to entirely uproot and abolish male supremacy. Radical feminists see institutions like marriage and the nuclear family as sites where women's labor is extracted and their autonomy constrained. They built domestic violence shelters when no one else would. They named sexual harassment and marital rape as crimes.
Both approaches recognize that control over reproduction sits at the center of women's subordination. You can't participate equally in work, education, or politics if the state can commandeer your body for nine months at any time. Laws mandating the continuation of pregnancy reinforce traditional gender roles and limit educational, economic, and political opportunities. That's why abortion access has always been a feminist issue — not because feminists love abortion, but because they recognize forced pregnancy as a mechanism of control.
Now layer in how abortion restrictions compound other forms of discrimination. Anti-Hispanic Discrimination: Prejudice, Stereotypes, and Hate explores how healthcare systems perpetuate inequality. In 2024, Hispanic and Black Americans remain disproportionally represented in the 10 states that have not taken up the ACA's Medicaid expansion. Those same states tend to have the strictest abortion bans. So if you're a low-income Black or Hispanic woman in one of those states, you face compounded barriers: no Medicaid expansion, no abortion access, and healthcare providers who may carry implicit biases that affect your care.
The maternal mortality numbers tell the story. A 2025 literature review found that maternal mortality decreased 21% in permissive states post-Dobbs but rose 56% overall in Texas during the first year of its post-six-week ban. Those deaths aren't evenly distributed. They fall hardest on women of color, women in rural areas, women without insurance.
Healthcare discrimination and reproductive restrictions aren't separate problems. They're the same system working as designed: sorting people into categories and deciding whose bodies matter, whose risks are acceptable, whose autonomy counts.
Here's what makes the whole debate even more frustrating: abortion restrictions don't actually reduce abortion rates. Zero Sum Politics walks through the data. Despite changing legal restrictions on abortion, the proportion of unintended pregnancies ending in abortion is typically similar among countries with restrictive and more permissive laws. What does reduce abortion? Comprehensive sex education and accessible contraception.
Federal funding for more comprehensive sex education led to an overall reduction in the teen birth rate at the county level of more than 3%. States that taught both contraception and abstinence had the lowest teen pregnancy rates. Abstinence-only education correlated with higher rates. The countries with the most liberal abortion laws — places like the Netherlands and Germany — have lower abortion rates than the United States because they prevent unintended pregnancies in the first place.
So if the goal were actually reducing abortion, we'd invest in sex education and free contraception. But that's not the goal. The goal is control.
As of 2026, US Politics 2024–2025 reports that 711 bills are under consideration across the country targeting trans and gender non-conforming people. The Trump administration has restricted federal recognition to two sexes, assigned at birth. The Supreme Court ruled in June 2025 that Tennessee's ban on gender-affirming care doesn't constitute sex discrimination.
These fights are connected. Abortion bans police women's bodies. Trans healthcare bans police gender nonconforming bodies. Both rest on the idea that the state gets to decide what you do with your body, that your autonomy is conditional, that certain forms of existence require permission.
Remember that Missouri Supreme Court ruling from the top? It came down the same month Lambda Legal filed suit challenging the State Department's refusal to issue accurate passports to transgender citizens. Different plaintiffs, same principle: the government claiming authority over your body that it claims over no one else's.
Discrimination doesn't stay in its lane. It's not abortion or workplace bias or healthcare disparities or gender policing. It's a system that decides some people's bodies are public property, some people's choices require justification, some people's autonomy is negotiable.
Feminism — whether you're working within institutions or trying to dismantle them — names that system and fights it. Sometimes through lawsuits and legislation. Sometimes through mutual aid and consciousness-raising. Always by insisting that bodily autonomy isn't a privilege the state grants. It's a right you already have.
The states with the strictest abortion bans also refuse Medicaid expansion, underfund sex education, and restrict trans healthcare. That's not coincidence. It's the same political project: controlling who gets to make decisions about their own body, their own life, their own future.
Which is why these fights aren't separate. They never were.
Composed with Quarex Compose