When Your Home State Also Becomes Your Abuser

Gabriela Gonzalez had been dating her abusive boyfriend, Harold Thompson, for four months in the spring of 2023 when she got pregnant.

Police records show that Thompson had physically abused Gonzalez several times throughout their relationship, including when she was pregnant. Thompson strangled Gonzalez and “recklessly caused bodily injury” in a December 2022 incident, according to court records. She told her family she wanted to leave him, but she was terrified.

“He was so angry that she wanted to get away from him,” Mileny Rubio, Gonzalez’s sister, told a local Dallas outlet. “She would always tell me that she wanted to leave, but that she couldn’t.”

Gonzalez knew she couldn’t continue the pregnancy because she did not want to be tied to her abuser for the rest of her life. But she lived in Dallas, Texas, where by last spring, abortion had been banned for nearly a year. So she drove to Colorado ― at least an 18-hour journey there and back ― to get an abortion.

The day after Gonzalez returned, Thompson found out about the abortion and confronted her in a gas station parking lot. Surveillance video, described in a police report, shows Thompson put Gonzalez in a chokehold before she was able to shrug him off. That’s when Thompson pulled out a gun and shot Gonzalez in the head. The video shows Thompson firing several more bullets into Gonzalez’s body before fleeing. He was charged with murder and is awaiting trial.

Gonzalez, like so many other domestic violence victims in Texas, faced an increased risk of violence from her abusive partner and a higher likelihood he would kill her because of the state’s decision to loosen gun laws and completely restrict access to abortion. Her story reflects the three systemic crises converging in Texas that are creating a deadly new normal for women. Each has resulted from a deliberate policy created by right-wing state lawmakers.

The leading cause of death among pregnant and postpartum women in the U.S. is homicide, most often by an abusive partner with a gun. Pregnant and postpartum women are more than twice as likely to be murdered than to die from sepsis, hypertensive disorders or hemorrhage.

Experts tell HuffPost other states with abortion bans are also seeing an increase in domestic violence, but Texas stands out for a few reasons. The state was the first to severely restrict abortion in 2021, forcing women to stay pregnant nearly a year before Roe fell and exposing domestic violence victims to more violence with fewer ways to escape. At the same time, the Lone Star state has the largest rate of gun sales in the country and continues to have lax firearm restrictions. The state is so firearm friendly that gun rights groups chose it as the testing ground for a Supreme Court case that will determine if domestic abusers get to keep their guns.

In the last decade, the amount of women shot and killed by an abuser has nearly doubled in Texas.

Even though Gonzalez was able to get an abortion, her abuser still had access to a firearm. Women who travel more than 150 miles to get an abortion are more likely to experience physical violence from an abuser than those traveling less than 50 miles. Gonzalez, who leaves behind three young children, traveled at least 500 miles on the last trip of her life.

HuffPost spoke with a dozen people working in advocacy services in the state ― ranging from abortion funds and family attorneys, to shelter directors and hotline staff ― who believe that the state’s abortion bans coupled with its lax gun laws are fueling intimate partner violence. Survivors and advocacy workers are terrified that this new normal will lead to more dead women in Texas: The state has made it easier for a man to obtain a gun to kill his partner than it is for a woman to access abortion care.

Domestic Violence Victims Are Especially Vulnerable To Abortion Bans

For Holly Bowles, a sexual assault victim advocate working in Texas, the hardest part of her job is telling someone they’re pregnant.

Bowles and her colleagues at SAFE Alliance, which is based in Austin, normally see people in the immediate aftermath of an assault. They serve around 6,000 Texans every year who have experienced emotionally and physically devastating violence. The nonprofit works with survivors of child abuse, human trafficking, intimate partner violence and sexual assault. Their hotline, which hears from around 2,000 callers a month, connects people to housing assistance, legal services — or to advocates like Bowles, who can support a victim through a rape kit exam or legal trial.

Around half of the survivors Bowles supports have experienced intimate partner violence, or are still in active situations. Most of the victims she sees can take emergency contraception after they finish the forensic exam, but for women in abusive relationships, some may already be pregnant from a prior assault by their partner. And they might not know it.

Recently, a staff member on Bowles’ team was sitting with a woman during a rape kit exam when the advocate had to tell her she was pregnant. “This was actually the fifth time I believe that her partner had gotten her pregnant intentionally so that she would stay,” said Bowles, who works as the director of SAFE’s sexual assault victim advocacy program.

Before Roe v. Wade fell in 2022, Bowles could connect victims with abortion clinics or even schedule an appointment for them. Now with a total abortion ban in effect in Texas, as well as a law criminalizing those who help people seeking care, Bowles has to tread extremely carefully.

“It’s very difficult to think about, in that immediate moment, what we can and can’t talk about,” she said. “We’re very limited in the things that we can do if someone does find themselves in that situation because of the laws in Texas.”

Since the Supreme Court repealed Roe, calls to the National Domestic Violence Hotline about reproductive coercion ― an umbrella term that includes when an abusive partner controls pregnancy outcomes, coerces someone into unprotected sex or tampers with birth control methods ― have doubled across the country.

Pregnant women were already more likely to be murdered by an intimate partner in states where abortion was restricted before Dobbs, according to a new study published in the Journal of American College of Surgeons. With 21 states now severely restricting or banning abortion altogether, “This problem is only going to be exponentially worse,” said senior author of the study Dr. Justin Cirone, a trauma surgeon and assistant professor of surgery at Wake Forest School of Medicine.

Millions of Texans are dealing with the repercussions of these bans, but victims of domestic violence are particularly vulnerable. An estimated 324,000 pregnant people are abused each year by an intimate partner, and research suggests that abortion access plays a critical role in reducing intimate partner violence.

For some victims, pregnancy can mean an increase in the severity of violence. For others it can actually initiate abuse in a relationship that was not violent beforehand often because of the financial and emotional stress pregnancy can create.

In Texas, specifically, calls citing firearms in situations of intimate partner violence have increased dramatically (47%) between 2022 and 2023. Adding a firearm into the mix increases the likelihood that the victim dies: Women are five times more likely to be killed in a situation of intimate partner violence if a gun is present.

The Supreme Court could make it even easier for domestic abusers to access firearms legally sometime this year. Following SCOTUS’ unprecedented reinterpretation of the Second Amendment in 2022, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a conviction of a Texas man, Zackey Rahimi, who was found with several firearms despite a previous arrest for domestic violence.

Under federal law, the protective order for domestic abuse against Rahimi stripped him of his right to possess the guns found in his home. The court of appeals overturned Rahimi’s conviction, ruling that the federal law violates people’s constitutional right to bear arms. The Supreme Court is set to make a decision in the case later this year.

Gun reform advocates and anti-domestic violence groups have worked tirelessly to close what many refer to as the “boyfriend loophole” ― a statute in the Violence Against Women Act that has allowed unmarried partners who are convicted of misdemeanor domestic violence to buy or own firearms. The Biden administration narrowed the loophole but did not fully close it, though many states have their own laws banning convicted domestic abusers from owning guns.

If SCOTUS sides with Rahimi, the consequences for victims of intimate partner violence will be deadly. “This [case] is essentially putting firearms into the hands of abusive partners and that equation means lethality for survivors,” Crystal Justice, the chief external affairs officer at the National Domestic Violence Hotline, told HuffPost. “Lives will be lost if the wrong decision is made in the Rahimi case.”

More Pregnant Domestic Violence Victims, Less Options

Recently, Marta Peláez started noticing more and more pregnant women and mothers with newborns seeking services at her San Antonio organization, the Battered Women and Children’s Shelter. She kept hearing from staff that more women were coming in with babies, and they needed help getting necessities like diapers and formula.

When Peláez looked at the intake data, there was a 12% increase in pregnant women or women with a baby under 12 months seeking services from 2022 to 2023. “To me, there is a big chance that this is because of their impossibility to get an abortion, plus the dynamics of how pregnancy plays a role in domestic violence,” she said.

Peláez is witnessing firsthand what statisticians are finding in their research. Birth rates in states with abortion bans have increased since Roe fell, according to the Institute of Labor Economics. Texas had the largest birth rate increase in the country in 2023, in part because the state is so large and there are longer travel times to the nearest abortion clinics. The year before, Texas had nearly 10,000 more births than expected in the last nine months of 2022 ― correlating to the state enacting the six-week ban in 2021.

When victims of intimate partner violence are forced to stay pregnant, they are likely to face more violence from their abusive partner and a heightened lethality of violence. Even if a survivor makes it through pregnancy and the postpartum period, and even if she’s able to escape at some later date, she’ll always be linked to her abuser through their child.

Research suggests that abortion access helps reduce domestic violence. The Turnaway Study, landmark research published in 2020, followed 1,000 women over the course of 10 years and analyzed the long-term impact of abortion access. The study found that after 2 1/2 years, the women who were denied abortions were more likely to experience violence from the men involved in the pregnancies because they have ongoing contact with them, even if they are no longer in a romantic relationship.

“You can’t trust your partner, you can’t ask someone for help, your neighbors are now hunting you ― it makes the entire world unsafe,” Lisa Pous, a survivor of intimate partner violence whose pronouns are she/they, told HuffPost. “How are we supposed to leave [our abusers]? What is the point of leaving?”

Pous was able to escape a 13-year abusive relationship in 2006 with the support of SAFE. Now, she’s the founder and director of the organization’s Survivor Peer Support program which offers emotional support and other resources to victims of intimate partner violence.

The program works with 300 survivors every year, with a small but mighty staff of five, including Pous. Their time is spent speaking with people in active domestic violence situations as well as survivors who are trying to get back on their feet. When the state passed the six-week abortion ban in 2021, survivors were confused and scared. Pous and her staff organized several talking groups so that people could ask questions and discuss their feelings about the law.

“We can’t tell the difference anymore between who’s harming us,” Pous said, referring to the Texas government and abusers. “To me, these laws say that my government doesn’t care if I die, the same way my partner didn’t.”

Pregnant people who have the resources are traveling out of Texas to get abortion care. But victims of intimate partner violence don’t have the money or freedom to travel; financial abuse is present in 99% of domestic violence relationships. Those who try to find resources and travel support through abortion funds are taking tremendous safety risks if their abuser finds out.

“The amount of times I’ve heard from clients who say, ‘He can’t know I had an abortion,’ or ‘I can’t have this child because I’ll be tied to this person forever,’ or ‘The last time I was pregnant, that’s when it was the worst.’ It was all the time,” said Anna Rupani, executive director at Fund Texas Choice, an abortion fund that offers travel support. It’s routine, Rupani said, to ask if it’s safe to call clients because so many are experiencing domestic violence.

Cathy Torres told HuffPost sometimes her staff at the Frontera Fund will field calls where the client is whispering over the phone because her abuser is in the next room. The majority of Torres’ clients at Frontera Fund, an abortion fund based in the Rio Grande Valley, are undocumented, which brings its own set of barriers.

“If someone is undocumented, abusers will say, ‘OK, I’ll call ICE on you or I’ll call customs,’” Torres said. “That has always been the case, always. But now they’re just emboldened.”

Time and time again, interpretations of state law very rarely end up supporting the pregnant person. Last year, a Texas man used the state’s six-week abortion ban to bring a $1 million wrongful death suit against three women for allegedly helping his ex-wife self-manage an abortion. The husband was emotionally abusive, according to court documents, and routinely threatened the wife including promising to drop the lawsuit if she had sex with him.

The three friends who helped the woman get abortion pills wrote in a countersuit that the ex-husband “did not file this lawsuit because he is interested in ‘protecting life’... Instead, he wanted to control a life.”

When The State Becomes The Abuser

Many victim advocates in Texas are now experiencing the same dreadful reality physicians are facing when it comes to abortion care: turn patients away, or give the standard of care and risk legal ramifications or the loss of funding.

All of the people working in advocacy services that HuffPost spoke with were afraid of Texas law enforcement, and deeply concerned about confidentiality.

“The biggest priority we have all the time is privacy and confidentiality,” one Texas advocacy worker, who asked to remain anonymous to avoid repercussions from the state, told HuffPost. “Now we’re being even more careful, we’re telling staff members: ‘Do you know about tracking devices on your phone?’ Because just the way we counsel people to be safe around their abusers, I feel like as an agency we have to do the same thing with our government now.”

Dr. Leila Wood, a professor at the Center for Violence Prevention and School of Nursing at the University of Texas Medical Branch, said physicians and advocates are at risk of experiencing a concept called “moral injury.”

“I see providers talking about the same thing in all of these pockets, which is the idea of: ‘I’m having to do something that is counter to my protective caring instincts with this vulnerable population’ or ‘I have to risk my own safety and security,’ and it’s a decision that people make differently,” said Wood, who has led statewide research on intimate partner violence in Texas.

Bowles, the sexual assault advocate with SAFE, has a hard time getting victims to be forthcoming in those initial conversations after she tells them they’re pregnant from intimate partner rape.

She’s always worried that the detailed medical records the forensic exam nurses take could be turned over to law enforcement for investigation if a pregnant rape victim contemplates abortion. Now, Bowles asks nurses to step out of the room before discussing next steps.

“We’re not violating [Texas’ abortion ban] or S.B. 8 in those conversations, but we put so much more thought and caution into how we give information to survivors because of that risk,” Bowles said.

Conversations with victims about reproductive health care could threaten an entire organization’s ability to help other victims. Many of the groups HuffPost spoke with don’t just provide anti-domestic violence services, they offer other critical community needs like housing and legal services for immigration or child custody disputes.

“Our programs receive state and federal dollars. Drawing attention to these issues is not necessarily super safe for us,” said a former employee of a large anti-domestic violence nonprofit in Texas.

Pous, the survivor of domestic violence who is now at SAFE, said many of the victims she works with feel trapped ― first by their abuser and now by their home state. She said it feels like a repetition of their entire life, working so hard to escape an abuser just to be met with more violence once they’re back on their feet.

She’s proud of the work she’s doing, and she will continue to support survivors as best as she can, but she’s exhausted and worries for the future.

“A lot of us really thought we were finding ways out of violence,” she said. “When the laws changed, we realized… we may never make it out.”