Bad Mood Rising

Women in States with Abortion Restrictions Are Depressed

My husband has joked that I’ve been in a bad mood since 2016. It’s part hyperbole, part genuine concern, and, well, not entirely untrue. It’s been a rough bunch of years for anyone who cares about democracy, fairness, and reproductive rights.  

We were at a water park with our then-small children when we heard the news that Antonin Scalia had died. I’m not saying we rejoiced, but we smiled a little bit and thanked the universe that Obama was still in office to choose his replacement.

And that’s when it began. The GOP rule breaking and my bad mood.

Watching Mitch McConnell—who had already publicly said his only Obama-era goal was to thwart Obama—rationalize why nine months before an election a sitting president had no right to appoint a Supreme Court Justice was infuriating. I comforted myself knowing that Hillary was going to win, and fantasized that Mitch’s comeuppance would come in the form of Obama himself being appointed to the high court.

What came next was not McConnell’s comeuppance (we’re all still waiting for Yertle the Turtle to fall). It was four years of being held hostage by an irrational president who was aided at every turn by McConnell and his power-hungry minions. Instead of teaching McConnell a lesson in humility, we got Neil Gorsuch.

My bad mood intensified.

Then Trump and his kids convinced Justice Kennedy to retire, and we got Brett Kavanaugh’s red-faced testimony about how he and P.J. and Squi did absolutely nothing wrong. I was teaching undergrads at the time and used one of my class periods for a lecture I called, “Why the Supreme Court is Important to Your Life, and Why You Don’t Want a Misogynist On It.”

It was a tiny bit cathartic, but my bad mood got worse, nonetheless.

For four years I joked that if RBG died just days before the election McConnell would totally fill her seat despite his convoluted explanation of why it was vital to the American people that Scalia’s seat sit empty for most of a year. And then, like a poorly scripted movie, it happened. Forty-five days before the election the 87-year-old succumbed to long-term health issues, and Mitch shoved his head up his own ass to come up with an explanation of why it was vital to the American people that her seat not sit empty.

He got away with it again, and we got an offensively unqualified woman who was clearly going to vote against the right of other women to control their own bodies.  

My bad mood got badder.

McConnell got exactly what he wanted; a conservative Supreme Court that leapt at the first chance to overturn Roe. Actually, he probably got more than he wanted. He’s too politically savvy not to have anticipated the fallout from a full reversal. I’m sure he hoped his ill-gotten majority would gut abortion rights but leave Roe in name only.

I take little comfort in that, however, because every day there is a new law that’s just a little bit worse than the last. And every week there is a new story of a woman denied medical care because lawmakers deemed her embryo more important than her. I feel like we’re just waiting for a woman to die from lack of care. (And while we’re at it, we’re waiting to see what rights lawmakers will attack next—the mifepristone case is coming, and we’re forced to talk about Comstock laws in 2024.)

It's enough to put anyone in a bad mood.

Turns out I’m not alone in my depression. A new study in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) finds that simply living in a state that limits access to abortion is linked to worsened symptoms of anxiety and depression in women of childbearing age.

Researchers at Johns Hopkins University analyzed results from a U.S. Census survey that asks people to rank their anxiety and depression symptoms on a scale from 0-4. The data they used was collected from over 700,000 people between December 2021 and January 2023 which included the leaked draft of the Dobbs decision and the decision itself.

The researchers looked closely at adults in the 13 states that had trigger laws designed to go into effect the instant the Supreme Court overturned Roe. The analysis found that from June 2022 to the end of that year, women of reproductive age (defined for this study as 18-45) in those states had larger increases in depression and anxiety symptoms than their peers in the 37 other states.     

Obviously, there were other things happening during those periods of time that could cause anxiety and depression. My 8-year slump has not been solely related to abortion rights. I mean in that time we also lived through an unprecedented global pandemic under the guidance of a leader who thought we should drink bleach and not wear masks, and then we watched as said leader desperately tried to stay in office despite election results. We’re also living in a world at war and heading into an election year that is triggering PTSD in all of us.

Still, it’s important to recognize what abortion laws are doing to women. There is an existing body of research that suggests that being denied access to abortion has negative physical and mental health repercussions. This newest study suggests that the threat of being denied such access is enough to trigger some of these issues.

The data for this study can’t explain why these women are depressed, but I’m guessing it starts with the fear of being forced to stay pregnant and the terror of facing a life-threatening situation that doctors can’t help you with. It doesn’t end there, though, because it’s not just about reproductive rights, it’s about what they represent.

By valuing the life of a fetus over that of a pregnant woman, lawmakers have effectively told all women that our value is tied to—if not limited to—our ability to reproduce. It’s hard not to feel like we lost all of the gains of the women’s rights movement in one fell swoop. Sure, we can still vote, hold elected office, and get credit cards without our husband’s approval, but the Supreme Court unceremoniously reminded us that we’re still second-class citizens. A sentiment that gets far worse for some women when race and socioeconomic status are added.

Isn’t everyone in a bad mood at this point?

More Proof that You Should Vaccinate Your Tween Against HPV

It’s the last day of Cervical Health Awareness Month, and we have another study that shows the importance of vaccinating young people against HPV.

This time researchers looked at the vaccination program in Scotland which offered HPV vaccines to girls in their first year of secondary school (age 12 or 13) starting in 2008. Their analysis of medical records found no cases of invasive cervical cancer in young women who had gotten the HPV vaccine by the time they were 14.

None. Zero. Zilch.  

I don’t know what vaccine sentiment is like in Scotland, but here the HPV vaccine has faced opposition both from those who believe all vaccines are a government/big pharma/autism-causing conspiracy and from those who think that protecting kids against an STI gives them license to get slutty. (In a Venn Diagram these two groups would certainly overlap, but I do believe it’s been a two-pronged attack.) I would hope that these definitive results would have even reluctant parents racing their tweens to the pediatrician.

Before anyone says, “we should wait until their older, I mean they’re not having sex,” let’s take a closer look at the findings. The vaccine effectiveness was 100% for immunization at age 12–13, 86% for immunization at age 14–16, and 39% for immunization at age 17–18. The study found no benefits when given to those 18 and over. The young women in this study are still in their twenties and early thirties which is early for invasive cervical cancer. Future research will tell us more.

It’s also worth noting that the young people in this study were given an earlier version of the vaccine that protected against the two types of HPV known to cause most cases of cervical cancer, as well as two types that cause genital warts. The vaccine that is currently available in the U.S.—Gardisil-9—protects against nine types of HPV known to cause cervical and other cancers such as anal, vulvar/vaginal, and oropharyngeal cancers (those of the head and neck). Hopefully, future studies will find this version more effective even if given at later ages.

That said, why not follow the CDC recommendations and get this shot as part of routine vaccination for 11- or 12-year-olds? I mean, you can’t do better, than 100% effectiveness.