Youth reacts to changing reproductive rights

By Julie Maslowsky, University of Michigan Young people in the U.S. are growing up in a very different world today than before the fall of Roe. Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images Adolescence and young adulthood is a time of identity formation, when young people figure out who they are and who they want to be. One of the ways they do this is by considering the world around them, paying attention to social issues and starting to understand their society and their place in it. Laws and policies signal to young people what society thinks of their value, their role in society and their opportunities for the future. But the experience of growing up in the post-Roe v. Wade era looks very different from that before the 50-year precedent was overturned in 2022. Following the Dobbs v. Jackson Supreme Court decision, more than half of U.S. adolescents, ages 13-19, now live in a state with severely restricted or no legal abortion access. As a result, today’s young people are coming of age in what one expert in health law and bioethics has termed an “era of rights retractions.” I am a developmental psychologist and population health scientist who studies adolescent...