I Was Hospitalized for My Postpartum Anxiety. Abortion Bans Mean More People Will End Up Like Me
My daughter was born last October. She was what some people call a rainbow baby, born just over a year after I had suffered a devastating miscarriage. My partner, our five-year-old son, and I were overjoyed. But not two months later, I was back in the hospital, feeling like I was losing my mind.
It had started when, a few weeks after the baby was born, our older child spiked a 102-degree fever. I cried for what felt like two straight days; I couldn’t stop. I felt like a helpless observer to the paranoid, panicky thoughts swirling around inside my head. Could they have COVID? Would we all get sick? Would the baby wind up in the hospital, or worse? I fixated on all of the worst-case scenarios, unable to apply reason or logic. Instead, I sunk deeper into my depression.
Within a few weeks, I developed all-day nausea. I completely lost my appetite; despite being starving because I was breastfeeding, I was lucky if I could manage to eat a few crackers all day. My whole body was shaky, and I woke every morning consumed with dread. I couldn’t bear facing the long day of caring for a colicky baby and counted down the moments before I could go to bed. But despite my exhaustion, I couldn’t sleep—even those precious few hours when the baby slept.
Then came the panic attacks. All night, every night. They would wake me up like clockwork, 20 minutes into a sleep cycle, and kept me up for the rest of the night. One morning I paced around our house at 4 a.m., having been awake since midnight trying everything I knew to quell the panic attack while the rest of my household slept. I called the hospital where I delivered my baby at some point, sobbing hysterically, but I didn’t get a call back. That morning before the sun rose, I called a Lyft to take me to the emergency room, but I quickly cancelled it, terrified the hospital would turn me away. Panic attacks are no reason to go to the emergency room, I thought. Especially not during a pandemic.
I was at a crisis point, unable to care for my baby under the weight of my debilitating fatigue, nausea, and racing heart. I thought if I was just strong enough, I could get better without help. But things only got worse.
I don’t want to be in my body anymore, I told my partner the day I was admitted to the hospital. I got switched with the wrong body, and I’m not sure how to get out of this one. I wasn’t suicidal, but I fantasized about being locked away for just a few weeks to escape my reality. I was terrified at the thought of never being “me” again.
It took three full days of hospitalization for my care team to find the right combination of medications to stop the panic attacks and help me sleep. Three full days of round-the-clock care, constant monitoring, heavy sedatives, and anti-anxiety drugs—all while away from my newborn baby—before I even started to feel like myself again.
Even as someone who has spent her career advocating for reproductive health and rights, I was shocked at how severe my postpartum anxiety and depression were. But I knew my situation was far from uncommon—about 1 in 7 people will develop postpartum depression after giving birth and estimates for postpartum anxiety are even higher. Worse, I knew our country’s worsening abortion access crisis would mean more people would find themselves in a hospital bed like mine because they were denied an abortion and forced to give birth.
Just two months before my hospitalization, a Texas law known as S.B. 8 took effect, which effectively prohibited abortions in Texas by deputizing private citizens to enforce an abortion ban after about six weeks of pregnancy. (My organization is challenging the law.) This meant that there were already countless people who had been denied care in their home state. As I lie in my hospital bed, I wondered how many of those who couldn’t leave Texas or access medications to self-manage an abortion would face a mental health crisis like my own.
These numbers are likely to grow exponentially. Just last week, a draft Supreme Court opinion in Jackson Women’s Health Organization v. Dobbs was leaked in which five justices voted to overturn Roe v. Wade. Abortion rights advocates are bracing for a final decision in June that will completely eradicate the right to abortion in roughly half the United States. Are the states eager to ban abortion prepared to take on the mental health care needs of the people whom they have forced to give birth?
These ripple effects of pregnancy mandates should not be minimized. Already hundreds of thousands of people every year need postpartum mental health care, assuming they can afford it and find a provider in a healthcare system already stretched thin. These numbers will multiply if Roe v. Wade is overturned.
Hospitalization, medication management, reproductive psychiatrists, therapy—all of these treatments are expensive and often not covered by insurance. I should know: My own insurance carrier initially declined to cover my hospital bill, deeming my hospitalization “not medically necessary,” in spite of the debilitating and potentially life-threatening symptoms I was suffering.
And on top of postpartum care and crisis response, what do the states bent on banning abortion plan to do when, inevitably, people can’t afford the other major expenses that accompany pregnancy and childbirth—prenatal care, labor and delivery services, lactation support, childcare, and so on? Will they turn a blind eye to the real-life costs and consequences of mandating that every pregnancy be carried to term? The dismal maternal and child health outcomes in many of these states suggest this is merely a rhetorical question, and a bitterly laughable one at that.
At oral argument in Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Justice Amy Coney Barrett suggested that abortion bans might be acceptable because the burdens of parenting would be effectively erased by safe haven laws, which allow a parent to leave a child they cannot care for at a designated location, no questions asked. But this analysis conveniently erases the physical and mental health tolls of pregnancy, childbirth, and the postpartum period. Pregnancy can entail nine months of debilitating morning sickness, health complications, and pain. Childbirth involves its own set of risks and complications, which fall hardest on women of color (and particularly Black women). And childbirth is necessarily followed by the postpartum period, which encompasses weeks, if not months, of physical recovery and can seriously jeopardize a person’s mental health—as I am all too aware.
Fortunately, I am much better now—back to being “me,” even. But the memory of living for weeks with relentless panic attacks, debilitating exhaustion, and a gripping fear that I would never feel like myself again will live in my body forever.
These were physical and mental health risks I was willing to take for a pregnancy I deeply wanted. To force them on someone who does not want to be pregnant is simply unconscionable.
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