Abortion Bans After Dobbs Linked to Higher Postpartum Depression Among Low-Income Women, Study Finds

Medicaid study finds abortion bans tied to a 9% increase in postpartum depression among low-income mothers, and no significant impact in higher-income areas.

NEW YORK, NY, UNITED STATES, February 4, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ -- A major new analysis of Medicaid data suggests that state abortion bans enacted after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision have intensified mental health risks for low income mothers, even as women in more affluent areas appear largely insulated from those effects.

The study, published in JAMA Network Open, examined more than 160,000 pregnancies among Medicaid enrollees between 2019 and 2024, comparing women and adolescents in 14 states with “trigger” abortion bans with those in 36 states where abortion remained legal. Using detailed claims data from Kythera Labs, the researchers tracked new diagnoses of postpartum depression in the year after delivery and sorted patients into low, middle, and high socioeconomic status based on the characteristics of their home ZIP codes.

Their central finding: Among residents of the lowest income communities, those residing in states with abortion bans saw a 9% relative increase in postpartum depression diagnoses after Dobbs compared with similar Medicaid patients in states without bans. No meaningful change was detected for women in middle or high socioeconomic status (SES) communities, suggesting that the psychological fallout of abortion restrictions is falling hardest on those with the fewest resources.

“Low income women and adolescents in trigger-law states are not only more exposed to restrictive abortion policies, they also have fewer mental health resources to buffer the impact,” said Onur Baser, the study’s lead author, a professor of economics at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul and an associate professor of health economics at the City University of New York School of Public Health.

Baser conducted the work with Professor Facundo Sepulveda of the University of Santiago and colleagues at Columbia Data Analytics, a health consultant company based in New York, drawing on Kythera Labs' nationwide Medicaid claims to follow patients over time. The team notes that trigger law states in the study tended to have fewer behavioral health clinicians, less federal mental health funding per capita and lower rates of Medicaid expansion—structural gaps that may compound the effects of abortion bans on maternal mental health.

Elizabeth Vivier
Columbia Data Analytics
lizv@cdanyc.com
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