A briefing paper prepared by Sameera Nayak for the Council on Contemporary Families symposium Policies Affecting Families: What We Know, and What to Expect in the Second Trump Term
Immigration is a key target of the new administration. Alongside this, since the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), states have moved quickly to restrict abortion further. Immigrant women seeking abortions are especially vulnerable to these new converging legal changes.
The U.S. is home to more than 23 million immigrant women, and 54% of immigrant women are of reproductive age (15-49 years old). We know very little about the abortion access and experiences of immigrant women. A recent systematic review found only eight studies on this topic; some had very small sample sizes of immigrant participants or were of poor quality. What we do know is that although immigrants appear to have lower rates of abortion than their U.S.-born counterparts, those who do access abortion services are often more socially disadvantaged: they are more likely to live below the federal poverty line, lack health insurance coverage, and have less than a high school education. Foreign-born women are also more likely to attempt to self-induce or self-manage abortions, using medications like misoprostol or turning to traditional healers for herbal remedies, drinks, and physical inductions (e.g., carrying heavy things, inserting needles or wires into the uterus). While medication abortions are exceedingly safe, unsafe alternatives that include ingesting toxic substances or causing physical injury are not. In fact, unsafe abortions are a leading and preventable cause of worldwide maternal mortality.
Since the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), the legal right to abortion is no longer federally protected.Many states have enacted restrictive legislation, making abortion services challenging to access or functionally inaccessible. Currently, at least 12 states have banned abortion (Alabama, Arkansas, Idaho, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, and West Virginia), and four states have banned abortion after six weeks gestation (Florida, Georgia, Iowa, and South Carolina).
Fifteen of these states (Alabama, Mississippi, West Virginia, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Kentucky, Missouri, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Florida, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Oklahoma) are also classified by researchers as having exclusionary immigration policy contexts, indicating a preponderance of policies that restrict rights or eligibility based on immigration status. Some examples of these include states that have no policies on providing care to pregnant women regardless of legal status, states that do not include undocumented immigrants in the definition of employee, and states that mandate employers to use E-Verify.
In his first week in office, President Trump signed eight executive orders on immigration. These range from attempting to deny birthright citizenship to children born to non-U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents (green card holders), to freezing refugee admissions and increasing vetting procedures for those seeking visas to enter the U.S. This is not surprising. In his first term, the Trump administration enacted 472 executive and administrative changes targeting the U.S. immigration system. In these settings that restrict both immigration and reproductive access, immigrant women, particularly undocumented women, are especially vulnerable to sexual and reproductive access inequities.
Legal experts have noted a rising criminalization of abortion. This includes strengthening “fetal personhood” laws, which give fetuses the same rights as a person. For example, legislators in states such as Indiana, Oklahoma, North Dakota, South Carolina have begun to introduce bills to redefine abortion as homicide. Concurrently, we are seeing restrictive and punitive immigration legislation at the state and federal levels. In states like Florida and Texas, undocumented women seeking abortion care have to contend with barriers to both abortion care and the threat of detention and deportation. A 2024 report from the ACLU highlights the challenges faced by immigrants seeking an abortion while navigating the labyrinth of checkpoints in the border zone of Texas. As the Trump administration considers increasing funds for border security and immigration enforcement, this situation is likely to worsen. Executive director of the Washington Immigrant Solidarity Network, Brenda Rodriguez Lopez, described her own experience navigating being an undocumented immigrant seeking an abortion in a 2022 op-ed for Teen Vogue.
Last month, the Florida legislature passed the Tackling and Reforming Unlawful Migration Policy Act (or TRUMP Act). One late addition to the act was mandating the death penalty for undocumented immigrants who are convicted of capital offenses, including the “murder or rape of a child.” What is troubling is how these laws and policies might coalesce to criminalize immigrants seeking abortion care. If states begin to simultaneously pass laws that have harsher sentencing for immigrants while also adding more criminalizing penalties for abortion, immigrants seeking abortion care may plausibly be at the nexus of vulnerability. Concerningly, research has found that immigrant women are less likely to have accurate knowledge about abortion laws and services.
Moreover, even if legislation does not come to fruition or is stalled by the judiciary, the fear itself can create a catastrophic climate. We have seen this time and again in other contexts. The infamous “public charge rule” of 2018 resulted in many eligible noncitizens disenrolling from social safety net programs such as Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC). In my own research with colleagues, we spoke with 38 lawyers, counselors, advocates, and other providers who worked with immigrant survivors of domestic violence. Our 2023 study highlighted that the fear created during the last Trump administration continued to persist into 2021 and 2022, leaving immigrant survivors afraid of detention and deportation and reluctant to access services. Thus, immigrants seeking abortions might be deterred by the fear of persecution itself, leaving them with no choice but to turn to unsafe and unregulated alternatives. If the criminalization of abortion and immigration continues at its current pace, already vulnerable immigrant women will be the ones to suffer – risking death, morbidity, loss of fertility, and loss of autonomy.
About the Author
Sameera S. Nayak is an Assistant Professor of Public Health in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Public Health at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She can be reached at snayak@umbc.edu.
Acknowledgment
The author would like to thank the staff at CCF for their assistance with the production of this article and Arielle Kuperberg and Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan, for their helpful comments in drafting this brief.
