The landscape of reproductive health care in the United States underwent a profound transforma- tion following the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), which overturned Roe v. Wade (1973) and removed federal protections for abortion rights. This landmark ruling activated trigger bans in 14 states and ushered in a wave of new restrictions, including gestational age limits ranging from 6 to 18 weeks in seven states. In many cases, these restrictions forced women to travel hundreds of miles to access abortion care, substantially in- creasing the time, cost, and logistical complexity of obtaining services (Myers et al. 2025). Prior research has shown that long travel distances are a major barrier to care, particularly for those with limited financial resources (Fischer et al. 2018; Lindo and Pineda-Torres 2021; Venator and Fletcher 2021; Myers 2024a; Myers et al. 2025). Although the national number of abortions in- creased in the year following Dobbs—driven in part by expanded access to medication abortion via telehealth and the growing role of abortion funds and shield laws (Maddow-Zimet and Gibson 2024; Society of Family Planning 2024)—recent studies documented that states enacting abortion bans experienced an average 2.3% increase in births relative to states that did not restrict abortion access post-Dobbs (Dench et al. 2024) and these effects are more pronounced in locations with greater increases in travel distance to nearest abortion clinics (Myers et al. 2025).

While the direct reproductive consequences of these policies are well-documented, less atten- tion has been paid to their broader social and interpersonal impacts. Given recent policy changes, there is a pressing need to explore the potential influence of abortion policy on women’s risk of intimate partner violence (IPV) victimization in the post-Dobbs landscape. IPV is the most com- mon form of violence experienced by women, imposing adverse consequences for the physical and mental health of victims and their children. According to the National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey (NISVS), 6.6% of women report experiencing IPV in the past 12 months, with a lifetime prevalence of 37% (Smith et al. 2017). Over half of all female homicide victims are murdered by a current or former intimate partner (Ertl 2019), and the total lifetime health and economic costs of IPV in the U.S. exceed $4.1 trillion (in 2021 dollars), including $1.5 trillion in lost productivity and earnings (Peterson et al. 2018).

State policy surrounding access to abortion may have unintended effects on the family en- vironment and various forms of stress, that could result in IPV. First, restrictions could lead to substantial financial strains, including increased costs of transportation, time away from work, and childcare, which could delay or prevent individuals from accessing care. Carrying a pregnancy, having a baby, and raising a child is costly. Additional financial pressures may serve to exacerbate the potential for IPV (Benson and Fox 2002). Relative to those who received abortion care, those denied an abortion had higher rates of poverty, less resources to provide for existing children at home, and lower credit scores (Foster et al. 2018; Roberts et al. 2014; Miller et al. 2023). Second, restrictions in access could affect health outcomes, which may alter relationship quality and the potential risk for IPV (Herd et al. 2016). Adverse (physical or mental) health consequences could be experienced with an unintended or high-risk pregnancy (Herd et al. 2016). Finally, abortion restrictions could lead to changes in intra-household power dynamics, increasing the risk of IPV, either through reproductive coercion (Miller et al. 2010) or by binding women to violent partners (Roberts et al. 2014). Evidence from the Turnaway Study illustrated that those denied an abor- tion (relative to those who received an abortion just prior to a facility’s gestational age limit) were more likely to experience IPV (Roberts et al. 2014). Recent evidence also shows that abortion restrictions, including mandatory waiting periods (MWPs) for abortion (Durrance et al. 2024) and TRAP laws (Muratori 2025), are associated with increases in IPV. An important point that follows from this literature is that abortion restrictions need not affect pregnancy resolution in order to in- fluence the risk of IPV exposure; pathways operating through delays, financial strains, stress, and prolonged engagement with violent partners, for instance, can all affect relationship quality and increase the risk of interpersonal violence, even if an abortion is obtained.

In this study, we provide the first causal evidence on how policies regulating abortion access post-Dobbs have impacted women’s risk of exposure to IPV. We combine data on reported IPV incidents to law enforcement agencies from the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NI- BRS) from 2017 to 2023 with a newly developed dataset on travel distances to the closest abortion facility, compiled by Myers (2024b). We supplement this variation with state policy decisions around Dobbs (Dench et al. 2024). The Dobbs decision resulted in immediate trigger bans in 14 states, discretely increasing travel distances to the nearest clinic in those states. Several other states passed total (or partial) bans after that. Using these changes in county-level travel distances to the nearest abortion facility, we implement a continuous treatment difference-in-differences (DID) re- search design to measure the effects of driving distance to the nearest abortion facility on IPV rates, comparing exposed counties where travel distance increased to counties with low (or no) increases in travel distance between 2017 and 2023. We complement this analysis with a syn- thetic difference-in-differences (SDID) approach, that is robust to potential biases from spatial and dynamic heterogeneity, by leveraging the adoption of state abortion bans following Dobbs as a dichotomous treatment. We show that our results are robust to controlling for time-varying demo- graphic and socioeconomic characteristics at the county level, and time-varying state policies, and proxies for time-varying spatial heterogeneity.

Our findings consistently show that abortion restrictions (both increases in the distance traveled to the nearest abortion facility and state abortion bans) increase the rate of exposure to IPV. This evidence is consistent with recent work showing that travel distance plays an important barrier to abortion care in the post-Dobbs period despite expanded access through telehealth and travel assistance (Myers et al. 2025). We find that abortion restrictions – alternately measured by increase in travel distance and by the presence of a near-total ban – significantly increased the rate of IPV for reproductive-age women in treated counties by about seven to 10 percent. Specifically, our SDID event study estimates suggest an increase in the IPV rate of approximately 6.1–7.5 percent. Given that the average resident in a treated “trigger ban” state experienced an increase of 241 miles in distance to the nearest abortion provider after Dobbs, our distance-based estimates suggest that this treatment dose is associated with approximately a 10 percent rise in the IPV rate in these states on average. These estimates imply at least 9,000 additional incidents of IPV among women in the treated “trigger ban” states, which would be predicted to add over $1.24 billion in social costs.

Our study contributes to a growing body of research examining how reproductive rights poli- cies affect broader social and economic dynamics beyond their immediate effects on fertility and health.1 A number of empirical studies have demonstrated that access to abortion and contracep- tion has significant consequences for women’s educational and labor market outcomes (Goldin and Katz 2002; Bailey 2006; Jones and Pineda-Torres 2024) as well as their access to credit markets and financial outcomes (Foster et al. 2022; Miller et al. 2023). Related studies found substantial ef- fects of these policies on children’s well-being, life circumstances, and the likelihood of exposure to child maltreatment (Ananat and Hungerman 2012; Foster et al. 2018; Bailey et al. 2019; Dur- rance et al. 2025; Aslim et al. 2024). Our paper is also closely related to prior studies that examined the effects of mandatory waiting periods on IPV in the US and the effects of improved access to abortion on IPV in Mexico (Durrance et al. 2024; Garcia-Ramos and Pineda-Torres 2023). Build- ing on this literature, our study provides new evidence on how abortion restrictions following the Dobbs decision affect women’s risk of IPV. By examining the effects of increased travel distance to abortion facilities on IPV exposure, we extend the scope of prior work by highlighting a critical, yet underexplored, interpersonal dimension of reproductive health policy: its capacity to affect women’s vulnerability to violence through economic stress, deteriorating health, and constrained bargaining power in relationships.

Furthermore, our study relates to the extended literature on the public policy changes that affect the prevalence of IPV, ranging from mandatory arrest laws (Iyengar 2009; Chin and Cunningham 2019), unilateral divorce laws (Stevenson and Wolfers 2006), reformulation of prescription opioids and introduction of prescription drug monitoring programs (Dave et al. 2023, 2024), conditional cash transfers (Bobonis et al. 2013), educational reforms (Erten and Keskin 2018), women’s po- litical participation (Stern and Erten 2024; Anukriti et al. 2025), social welfare policy (Johnson- Motoyama et al. 2022; Ginther and Johnson-Motoyama 2022), labor market shocks (Erten and Keskin 2021, 2024), and other shocks including the COVID-19 public health crisis (Bullinger et al. 2021; Erten et al. 2022), major sporting events (Card and Dahl 2011), and college party cul- ture (Lindo et al. 2018). Our study contributes to this literature by examining the effects of more stringent abortion restrictions introduced in the post-Dobbs era on the prevalence of IPV.

The remainder of this article is organized as follows. Section 2 discusses the data. Section 3 presents the identification strategy we employ in our analysis. Section 4 presents our findings and robustness checks, and Section 5 concludes the paper.