‘Reproductive Coercion’: PBS NewsHour Connects Pro-Life Victories to Domestic Violence

At the PBS NewsHour, they hate the overturning of Roe vs. Wade and abortion on demand so much, they will relate it to domestic violence. As if abortion isn’t violence? On Friday, they headlined their segment “The link between a lack of reproductive rights and domestic violence.” PBS anchor Amna Nawaz noted that “researchers” made a pro-abortion connection:

NAWAZ: Long before the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade, ending the constitutional right to an abortion, researchers noticed a link between women having abortion access and a reduced risk of violence from men.

Now, in the wake of the court’s decision, the opposite is happening, both anecdotally and in the data. Abortion restrictions have led to a significant uptick in intimate partner violence. The National Domestic Violence Hotline reports seeing nearly 100 percent increase in calls.

PBS health reporter Laura Santhanam picked up the leftist ball: “So, each year, roughly 12 million people are affected by domestic violence in the U.S. And part of what perpetuates that violence are control, isolation of victims by the abusers. When we saw overnight in many places the loss of access to nearby abortions just evaporate, people began to suffer.”

She turned to Crystal Justice of the National Domestic Violence Hotline — which is funded by the Department of Health and Human Services — for more advocacy: “After the Dobbs decision, we knew that we were going to be hearing from survivors all over the country who were going to need critical support to talk about the abuse they were experiencing, to talk about the fears that they were feeling, that now their access to reproductive health care has essentially been removed.”

Then Nawaz asked Santhanam to explain the concept of “reproductive coercion,” where male abusers would deny women control over their own bodies, even making sure they cut off access to birth control. In one story, a woman became pregnant, and in a “terrible story,” she couldn’t kill her baby. There’s no connection made with the “reproductive coercion” practiced on the unborn:

SANTHANAM: Eventually, she became pregnant, and she was in a state where she could not access abortion. She also didn’t have the financial wherewithal to go somewhere else where she legally could. So, that — and that terrible story, it’s not a one-off. According to experts who I have been talking to, it’s happening again and again and this country. And it’s getting worse after Dobbs.

Santhanam wrote a similar article a few weeks ago (displayed on screen in this segment) where she lamented “Massive bottlenecks in abortion-related services have led to a spillover of demand that a shrinking number of states and health care providers must then meet.”

These people actually advocate that abortion is essential to “a life free from violence.”

We hear from survivors every day who experience sexual abuse & reproductive coercion—access to reproductive health care, including safe and legal abortion, is essential to a life free from violence. Today’s SCOTUS ruling eliminates equitable access to health care for survivors. pic.twitter.com/yoLFUgbEIG

— National Domestic Violence Hotline (@ndvh) June 24, 2022

This PBS NewsHour segment was supported in part by Consumer Cellular.