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When the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Kersha Deibel had a bad feeling that it was only part of renewed challenges to broader rights facing the LGBTQ community.
“They (lawmakers) are not going to stop just at abortion, and they’re going to do everything they can to try to dismantle this movement, dismantle access to bodily autonomy,” said Deibel, CEO of Planned Parenthood Southwest Ohio Region, who is queer.
“We are going to fight like hell to make sure that our patients, that our communities remain safe and remain with the highest quality care.”
Deibel, 35, and other people in the LGBTQ community are worried that the aftermath of the ruling will affect their health care and rights at a time when legislators in states across America are already passing a number of anti-LGBTQ laws.
According to the Human Rights Campaign, the country’s largest LGBTQ rights group, state legislators have introduced more than 340 anti-LGBTQ bills so far this year.
In Ohio, House Republicans passed a bill in June that would prohibit transgender girls from joining female sports teams in high school and college. In April, Reps. Mike Loychik, R-Bazetta, and Jean Schmidt, R-Loveland introduced House Bill 616, which would ban discussion on sexual orientation and gender identity until fourth grade in all public and most private schools.
Discrimination, poverty reasons why LGBTQ people have abortions
While cisgender, heterosexual women are the largest population known to have abortions, queer women, transgender men, and intersex and non-binary people seek abortion services as well.
The reasons people may seek an abortion include negative and discriminatory experiences with health care providers, specifically in reproductive health care settings, according to the Human Rights Campaign. Living in poverty can also play a role, as LGBTQ people collectively have a poverty rate of 21.6%, according to The Williams Institute, a research center on sexual orientation and gender identity law and public policy at UCLA School of Law.
Lesbian and bisexual women who have been pregnant are more likely than heterosexual women who have been pregnant to have had an abortion, according to the 2017-2019 National Survey for Family Growth conducted by the Human Rights Campaign.
And in a 2021 study from the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, 433 pregnancies were reported from 210 transgender, non-binary and intersex respondents. Twenty-one percent of those pregnancies ended in abortion, compared to 15.4% for heterosexual women.
LGBTQ people are also more likely to have a mistimed pregnancy — one that happened earlier in life than they would have liked — or an unwanted pregnancy, the Human Rights Campaign reported.
That’s the situation Deibel said she was in when she became pregnant at the age of 20. Involved in a toxic relationship, she was a senior at the University of Cincinnati and about to go off to graduate school at Washington University in St. Louis.
Ultimately, Deibel decided having an abortion was the best choice for her after seeking information from educators and counselors from Planned Parenthood.
“And the moment I walked out of the health center was the first time in my life that I felt like I had power, that I was the only one that got to make decisions about my body,” Deibel said. “And that no one, nobody aside from me was going to tell me what I could or couldn’t do.”
Transgender, non-binary health care could be impacted
Like Deibel, Rhea Debussy, 31, is concerned how the Supreme Court’s ruling will affect access to care.
The Equitas Health external affairs director, who is transgender, said the end of Roe v. Wade will undermine access to gender-affirming care, which consists of surgical, nonsurgical and mental health care services available to transgender, non-binary and gender non-conforming people. Equitas is a nonprofit healthcare system that focuses on serving the LGBTQ community.
Other reproductive services such as in vitro fertilization — a process used by many in the LGBTQ community to have children — could also be affected, Debussy said, citing Ohio House Bill 704 as a reason.
Introduced by Ohio lawmakers earlier in July, the bill would recognize the personhood of the unborn child from the moment of conception, effectively banning all abortions except to save the life of a mother. If the bill passes, Debussy said the state would recognize a fertilized egg as a person. This could make fertility and IVF treatments inaccessible, she said.
“We need to pay attention to the fact that rights should not be taken for granted,” Debussy said.
She said much needs to be done moving forward to protect these and other health care rights for the LGBTQ community.
“There’s a lot of work to be done regardless of this Supreme Court decision.”
‘This affects all of us’
Maggie Scotece, interim executive director of the Abortion Fund of Ohio (formerly Women Have Options Ohio), said her staff members, many of whom are queer like her, are feeling attacked. The organization provides financial assistance and practical support for patients seeking abortion services.
“We know the Roe decision means loss of bodily autonomy in terms of our reproduction, in terms of our health care, but (it) also signals concerns about our freedom as LGBTQ folks as well,” Scotece, 31, said. “And (it) is yet another battle that we’re trying to fight. It makes it 10 times more exhausting to feel like multiple identities are being attacked.”
Unique challenges that face the LGBTQ community and others served by the organization — including members of the Black, Indigenous, and other people of color communities — mean that the implications of the end of Roe v. Wade are far-reaching, Scotece said.
“This impacts all of us, and it’s not a single issue fight,” Scotece said. “We can’t have reproductive justice and abortion liberation until we also have racial justice and environmental justice and gender justice.”
mwalker@dispatch.com
@micah_walker701
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