Parents Need Time, Not Deadlines, After Fetal Diagnoses
Abortion Restrictions Can Backfire, Pushing Families to End Pregnancies
In Their Own Words
The Unseen Fallout of Abortion Bans
How Threatened Reproductive Rights Pushed More Pennsylvanians Toward Sterilization
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This op-ed originally appeared in the Philadelphia Citizen on October 16, 2025.
My patient, Megan, is 27. She has never had children and is certain she never wants them. In the days after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, she scheduled surgery to have her fallopian tubes removed.
She was not alone. Tanesha, 29, a mother of two, decided her family was complete. And Cara, 30, already balancing care for a child, a sister’s children, and her aging mother, wanted to be sure she wouldn’t face another pregnancy. All three women sat across from me on a single afternoon, asking for the same procedure: permanent contraception, often referred to as “getting your tubes tied.”
At face value, none of these stories is surprising — I’m an OB/GYN and regularly perform the surgery for sterilization for women, which we call permanent tubal contraception. But it was odd that all three patients were squeezed into a single afternoon session. Usually, I might see one of these requests a week. Something had changed.
On June 24, 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court erased the nationwide right to abortion in its Dobbs decision. Many states immediately enacted bans. Pennsylvania, where I practice, did not. Yet fears of abortion bans traveled across state lines. The prospect of an unintended pregnancy now carried new weight: What if abortion became unavailable tomorrow?
In my recent research, I examined sterilization trends in Pennsylvania, where abortion remains legal. We found a clear rise in permanent contraception after Dobbs — particularly among more educated, higher-income women and those who live further from abortion care, suggesting that for others barriers put the procedure out of reach. The rise we observed was temporary, but suggests future threats to abortion access may induce the same shifts.
Read the full op-ed here.
Author
Alice Abernathy, MD, MSHP
Assistant Professor, Obstetrics and Gynecology, Perelman School of Medicine
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