3 Issues Affecting Women's Mental Health Today

This episode is for women—cis women, trans women, BIPOC women, all women—because there is a lot happening in the United States and the world right now that could be negatively impacting folks' mental health. I'm going to talk about a few big things happening and why you should be aware of them.

Let’s start with abortion rights. In the US, several states have been enacting laws to limit access to abortion. Perhaps we have all forgotten what it was like in the before times when abortion was illegal, but let’s run through some facts that we know from research. Approximately one-quarter of women will have had an abortion by the time they are 45-years-old. In the past, when abortion was illegal, women engaged in unsafe abortions, which were colloquially referred to as “back-alley abortions,” or engaged in other harmful self practices in order to lose the child. Can you imagine the “How to Perform Your Own Abortion” TikToks that would blow up our social media? A recent study found that the vast majority of abortions were safe in countries where it was broadly legal and unsafe in countries where laws were highly restrictive. We could assume that the number of unsafe abortions will increase as restrictions increase. When we know that nearly a fourth of women will seek an abortion at some point in their lives, that could be devastating! We also live in a country that has limits on safer sex education in schools and abstinence-only education isn’t really effective, which doesn't help the situation.

You might be thinking—okay, Dr. Johnson, what's that have to do with mental health? Women who are denied abortions are more likely to experience lower self-esteem, lower life satisfaction, and increased anxiety than those that are able to receive one. Additionally, we don’t always take into account the life of the mother and the child once they are in the world. There are continued health and economic consequences which I have seen personally and professionally.

Let me give some color to this story. I am a cis-gendered woman and I was born into poverty in the South. My mother used to say, “we are not poor, we are po—we can’t afford the o and the r” My mother’s greatest fear for me as a child was that I would become pregnant as a teenager. We saw it every day in our environment. However, I had a fascination with reading at an early age, and she made sure the only thing I spread was the pages of a book. She also gave me appropriate sex education and when she dropped me off for my first day of college, she had my older brother slip me a CVS bag full of condoms. My mother was not playing around! She was not an educated woman, but she was clever. She understood all too well the effects unwanted and/or unplanned pregnancies could have on a person.

Research shows that experiencing unwanted pregnancies appears to be strongly...

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