Mentally ill people are considered a vulnerable population. People with mental health conditions are more likely than people without mental health conditions to be victims of crime, including domestic violence and sexual crimes. In addition to that, many people with mental illness live in poverty because their mental health condition prevents them from getting and keeping a steady job. Many people with mental illness are on disability for their mental illness, and they can barely survive on that small monthly check when they have to pay rent, food, and utilities costs. Never mind about paying for medications that aren't covered by insurance if they even have insurance, a car with car insurance, or a cellphone. Many mentally ill people are so unwell that they can barely take care of themselves, let alone another human being.
I am a mentally ill person. For the rest of my life, I will be a mentally ill person. Now, I may have reached a point in my treatment that I can live alongside my mental illness without fighting it every day of my life, but I do still have some periods in which my mental illness severely affects my ability to function at my usual level. Keeping my mental health in a place where I have more good days than bad days is like a full-time job for me, and it's the kind of full-time job that I can't really slack off of or take a vacation from.
I am also a person that does not want children...at all...ever...even under "ideal" circumstances for a lot of reasons that I won't go into detail about in this post. I did not make that decision lightly. I did not make that decision because I'm irresponsible, immature, selfish, lying to myself, too feminist, or any other stereotype that seems to be tossed at people who choose not to have children. I made the decision because being childfree is the best choice for me, my life, and my mental health.
Not only would having children be bad for my mental health because I would be trying to make myself fill a role that I felt I wasn't meant for, but I also already live with two clinically diagnosed mental health conditions. Treating, managing, and living healthily with those conditions takes a significant chunk of my internal resources. Parenting a child properly takes practically all of a person's internal (and in many cases all of a person's external) resources as well. So, when I consider the resources that I have and my mental health in thinking about whether I could adequately parent a child without my mental health or the child suffering, my answer is: NO, I COULD NOT DO IT. Yet, I could end up being forced to since I live in state with very strict abortion laws.
I know my story isn't unique. Plenty of people list mental illness as a reason that they have for choosing not to have children. Many people recognize that they don't have the internal and/or external resources to properly care for a child AND themselves. Many people don't want a child to suffer through growing up with a parent that has a mental illness that would interfere with parenting and/or don't want to subject a child to a genetic predisposition to a mental illness that would make life more difficult for them. In addition, many psychotropic medications (the medications used to treat mental health conditions) can cause birth defects, which can make babies unable to survive outside the womb or, if they do survive, they may be a child that needs expensive care or surgeries that someone who lives in poverty because of their mental illness wouldn't be able to afford.
Since Roe v Wade was overturned by the Supreme Court, many states, including the state that I live in, have laws that will go into effect banning abortions in almost all cases. There are no exceptions for rape or incest in my state's ban. There are also no exceptions for birth defects in the fetus in my state. There IS an exception for the health of the mother, but it only applies if the mother's life is in danger or if a major bodily function would be irreversibly damaged. As you can guess, mental health is not included under the exception for the health of the mother.
States like the one where I live already don't think of abortion as healthcare unless the person who is pregnant is teetering on the edge of death. So, of course, they completely ignore that abortion is a part of mental healthcare as well. For me, it doesn't seem that farfetched to be concerned that many people with mental health conditions will be forced to stop taking the psychotropic medications that literally save their lives once it's medically confirmed that they are pregnant because the fetus is already considered more important than the person carrying it, according to the coming law in my state.
With laws like these, we'll likely see an increase in suicide among mentally ill people who find themselves pregnant and can't access abortion and can no longer take their medications because they don't want to cause damage to the child they'll now have to raise. We'll see more children neglected and some actively harmed because they live with a parent who can't care for them because of a mental illness. We'll see more children who had the misfortune to be born with a genetic predisposition to mental illness left in foster care until they age out of the system because people don't want to adopt children with "red flags" like a family history of mental illness or possible birth defects. Those "unadoptable" children will grow up to be traumatized adults who will also need access to mental health services because the foster care system isn't actually the kid-friendly system people think it is.
Forcing more children to be born to people who don't have the ability or the resources to care for them isn't saving children. It's creating more children that will end up suffering. (And no, having a child more than likely won't be the thing that saves a mentally ill person from their illness. It doesn't work like that.) It'll actually create yet another crisis in mental health and even more of a strain for agencies like the Department of Human Services and Child Protective Services.
I'll end with this: Safe, legal and easy access to abortion isn't just healthcare, for many people it's also mental healthcare. If people with mental health conditions are barely surviving to care for themselves, expecting them to care for another human being that is completely dependent on them for survival is only going to be a stress that can exacerbate their mental illness. In fact, forcing anyone to live a life that they feel they can't sustain and be healthy, or that they feel isn't true to who they are, is going to have mental health consequences for them and the child they're going to be forced to care for.
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