Students wait for a bus outside Lane Tech College Prep High School in Chicago. Teen birth rates have been falling for decades, but abortion bans threaten to undo that progress, experts say. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)
Houston OB-GYN Dr. Hillary Boswell says she has seen how abortion bans affect teenage girls: More of them are carrying their pregnancies to term.
“These are vulnerable girls, and it’s just heartbreaking to see the number of pregnant 13-year-olds I’ve had to take care of,” Boswell said, referring to the change since Texas prohibited abortions after six weeks in September 2021. In June 2022, after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Texas enacted a total abortion ban.
“They would come in, and they would be very distressed,” said Boswell, who spent the past decade treating underserved women and girls at community health clinics. Not being able to help them get an abortion when they wanted one, she said, “was so hard — and so against everything that I trained for.”