Reproductive rights were hotly debated during the 2024 election, with young women especially advocating for greater protections. Anushri Saxena (Trinity ‘25), a public policy and global health major, is channeling her advocacy for women’s rights into Abortion Care Today, a Bass Connections project that examines how reproductive health care in the United States is changing. The issue became critical in 2022, when the US Supreme Court, overturning years of precedent, overruled Roe v Wade. In Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the majority of the justices found that the Constitution does not protect the right to an abortion. Growing up in a southern state with strict abortion restrictions, Saxena is dedicated to documenting the experiences of abortion and healthcare providers. Her interviews will be included in the project’s audio archive.
Can you give an overview of your work and what you are doing?
The project is called Abortion Care Today. The goal is to document the reproductive healthcare landscape in the aftermath of Dobbs v Jackson. The idea came from the two physicians on our team, Dr. Bev Gray and Dr. Jonas Swartz, who noticed that in the aftermath of Dobbs, the reproductive healthcare landscape was changing very rapidly and in lots of unexpected ways. There was a concern that a lot of this information was going to be lost to history. That’s where our project steps in through our oral history archive, which documents these changes in real time. We interview abortion providers, transcribe these interviews, find meaningful clips and then thematically organize those clips into our audio archive. Some of our themes are stigmatization and criminalization of providers, the inequitable impacts of these abortion bans, patient impacts, etc. We supplement the audio archive with the data team and their projects. Last year, one of our main projects was looking at where medical students, family medicine residents, and OBGYN residents are receiving their medical training according to abortion restrictiveness.
The work I’m doing on my Bass Connections team also informed my senior thesis on crisis pregnancy centers, which are anti-abortion organizations that pose as abortion-providing facilities. These organizations exist in all fifty states and even receive some state funding, including North Carolina. They pose a substantial threat to public health by delaying or preventing people from accessing real abortion care. My thesis explains why some states have more crisis pregnancy centers than others due to to post-Dobbs state-level policies and demographic characteristics.
Why did you decide to get involved with this work?
I decided to get involved because I’m from Texas. Texas has had the abortion issue at the forefront for a very long time, even before Roe v Wade was overturned. Texas was the first state to institute a six-week abortion ban by using a weird legal mechanism to circumvent the protections under Roe. Because I saw that happening in my home state, it's been an issue that's been on my mind for a long time. As someone interested in healthcare and a public policy and global health major, I think health equity and bodily autonomy are huge issues.
What is the importance of this work in terms of human rights?
I think there are clear connections between abortion and human rights. One is that healthcare is a human right. As much as abortion may be stigmatized, abortion is healthcare at the end of the day. I think because abortion bans uniquely criminalize safe, standard, and evidence-based healthcare and because other types of healthcare are not subject to the same scrutiny, it is a human rights issue. Bodily autonomy is a fundamental human right, which is at play when it comes to abortion. I also think equality under the law and freedom from discrimination are fundamental human rights. I don’t think we talk about abortion as an issue of equality as much as we maybe should because abortion bans don’t affect everyone equally, they only directly impact people who are capable of pregnancy. Within that group, they disproportionately impact some people more than others, for example, low-income women.
What do you think is the most important thing for other people to do if they want to get involved with reproductive rights?
There is a ton of misinformation out there when it comes to abortion. For example, I know there has been a lot of misinformation regarding late-term abortion and the fiction that abortions can happen after birth. I think educating yourself about all aspects of abortion and why it is important for people to have access to this care and preparing yourself to combat misinformation that you may hear will be an important way to continue coalition building in support of access to abortion.
Abortion Care Today
Can you share a couple of clips from the audio archive of your work?
Catch 22 falls under the category of legal barriers and red tape. Abortion bans disrupt the workflow of doctors, their ability to do their job, and also leaving them with impossible decisions. In Catch 22, Dr. Bernard talks both about how cumbersome it is to fill out this paperwork instead of being able to do her job and how it also interrupts the patient-provider relationship because you are having to ask more invasive questions than you would otherwise. The other main aspect of this clip highlights how these bans are putting providers in impossible situations. Every time a provider makes a decision about if a patient fits the exception criteria, she has to give that information to outside actors, with no medical experience most of the time, that can decide whether or not they think it's a good enough reason and investigate her as such if they don’t think it's a good enough reason.
A second clip, The Untold Story of Pregnancy and Childbirth, falls under the category of patient impacts on abortion care. This category covers abortion itself, but it also covers a lot of the spillover consequences in regards to how abortion bans are affecting miscarriage care, emergency situations like ectopic pregnancies, and the fact that more people are choosing to be sterilized. I think this clip aligns with the framework behind our project which is reproductive justice, the idea that people who want to have children should be able to have children, people who don’t should not be forced to have children, and that people should be able to raise their children in circumstances that are conducive to their health and wellbeing.