How Close to Death Must a Woman Be?
Abortion Rights and the Fight to Recognize Mental Health as Women’s Health
By Jasmin Faulk, WoLF Executive Director
A woman’s health cannot be divided into physical and mental compartments. Mental illness can threaten her safety, her ability to function and, in the most serious cases, her life. Yet abortion restrictions often place severe limits even on care for physical complications while treating mental-health emergencies as less legitimate still.
That distinction was challenged in Seyb v. Members of the Idaho Board of Medicine. In August 2026, a federal district court ruled that Idaho could not deny a medically necessary abortion when continuing a pregnancy presented a serious risk that a woman would die through suicide or overdose—both legitimate medical concerns that can place a woman’s life at grave risk. The court recognized a basic truth: the brain is an organ, psychiatric conditions are medical conditions, and women facing mental-health crises deserve the same lifesaving care as women facing physical complications. Women have historically been dismissed as “hysterical,” and their mental well-being has too often been treated as evidence of emotional instability or sentimental weakness rather than as a medical issue requiring intervention.
The decision in this case also recognized a narrow constitutional right to abortion when pregnancy threatens serious and lasting harm to a woman’s health. It grounded that right in self-preservation, the fundamental principle that women are entitled to protect their own lives and bodies, reaffirming a basic protection currently denied to women in many states across the United States.
This matters deeply in the uncertain landscape created by Dobbs. When abortion is criminalized, a woman may be forced to continue a pregnancy until her condition becomes catastrophic, or until a doctor believes she is close enough to death to justify treatment. That delay can result in lasting physical and psychological damage. No woman should have to deteriorate physically or psychologically before the law considers her worthy of care, and yet this is what women in the United States are still fighting.
The right to a safe and legal abortion is not separate from women's health; it is essential to it. Protecting women and believing in their equal worth means trusting them—together with their doctors—to make difficult medical decisions before illness becomes permanent injury or death. A woman should not have to surrender her right to safety, dignity or self-preservation simply because she is pregnant.
A woman’s right to choose means allowing her to make that decision for herself, whether her personal beliefs are pro-life or pro-choice. However, imposing an exclusively pro-life position denies women the ability to make that difficult decision when necessary, under the guise of religious or ethical ideology. For far too long, a woman’s “right to choose” has been used as a political slogan that gives both parties an opportunity to battle it out during election seasons, all while women continue to fight for their dignity, their health and, in many cases, their basic survival.