Abortion is an LGBTQ+ Issue

June 11, 2025

What does abortion have to do with gay rights? Many might assume that pregnancy isn’t much of an issue in the LGBTQ+ community, but they’d be wrong. A recent peer-reviewed study published in JAMA Network Open, provides recent data that underscores the experiences LGBTQ+ people may have with abortion.

In the study spanning 65 years, researchers considered over 235,000 pregnancies in nurses, their offspring, and nursing students. Each participant shared information about their pregnancy history and sexual orientation. The conclusion? As Cameron Oakes summarizes, people who identified as a “sexual minority” (i.e., LGBTQ+) were nearly twice as likely to have a pregnancy that ended in abortion than their strictly heterosexual peers. It follows that LGBTQ+ people may thus be disproportionally harmed by abortion restrictions.

Oakes explores possible reasons for this finding in her interview with Dr. Payal Chakraborty, the study’s primary author who is an epidemiologist and postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Dr. Chakraborty highlights that there are an array of explanations, many of which boil down to the fact that LGBTQ+ people are oppressed in the U.S. LGBTQ+ people’s greater likelihood to experience “discrimination in employment, in housing [and…] poverty” could very well be linked to a greater likelihood to seek abortion care. And “less access to health care and reproductive health care,” along with insufficient sex education, surely may also contribute to the finding.

We at the Woodhull Freedom Foundation have long joined other sexual freedom advocates in recognizing the simple truth: abortion is an LGBTQ+ issue. This Pride Month, we at Woodhull are grateful to have yet another set of data showing that liberation struggles, including the fights for abortion access and LGBTQ+ liberation, don’t occur in a vacuum. That’s why joining forces in solidarity, across movements, is so critical to the work that we do.