Women living in states with abortion Bans received the proceeding in the second half of 2023 at about the same pace as before the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, according to a report released Tuesday.
Women did this by traveling out of state or having prescription abortion pills mailed to them, according to the #WeCount report from the Society of Family Planning, which advocates access to abortion. They increasingly turned to telehealth, the report found, as medical providers in states with laws designed to protect them from prosecution in other states used online appointments to prescribe abortion pills.
“The abortion ban does not eliminate the need for abortion,” said Ushma Upadhyay, a public health social scientist at the University of California, San Francisco and co-chair of the #WeCount survey. “People jump over these hurdles because they have to.”
The #WeCount report began surveying abortion providers across the country on a monthly basis just before Roe was overturned a snapshot of abortion trends. In some states, some of the data is estimated. This effort makes data public with a lag of less than six months, providing a picture of trends much faster than the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, whose most recent annual report covers abortion in 2021.
The report describes rapid changes since the Supreme Court ruling Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling That ended the national right to abortion and opened the door to the enforcement of state bans.
The number of abortions in states that ban all stages of pregnancy has fallen to almost zero. It also fell in states where the ban takes effect from around six weeks of pregnancy, before many women know they are pregnant.
But the national total is about the same or higher than pre-ruling levels. The study estimates that 99,000 abortions occurred each month in the first half of 2024, compared to the 81,000 monthly abortions from April through December 2022 and 88,000 in 2023.
One reason is telehealth, which got a boost when some Democratic-controlled states began enacting laws last year to protect prescribers. In April 2022, about 1 in 25 abortions resulted from pills prescribed via telehealth, the report found. In June 2024 this was 1 in 5.
The latest report marks the first time #WeCount has broken down abortion pill prescription rates by state. About half of telehealth abortion pill prescriptions now go to patients in states with abortion bans or restrictions on telehealth abortion prescriptions.
In the second half of last year, the pills were sent to about 2,800 women every month Texasover 1,500 in Mississippi and almost 800 in Missourifor example.
Data from another group, the Guttmacher Institute, shows that women in states with bans still rely largely on travel to get abortions.
Combining the results of the two studies and comparing them to Guttmacher’s 2020 counts of personal abortions, #WeCount found that women in states with bans during pregnancy had abortions during pregnancy in similar numbers as in 2020. The numbers do not take into account pills obtained from outside the medical system in the earlier period, when these prescriptions usually came from abroad. They also don’t count people who were given pills but didn’t use them.
West Virginia For example, women received almost 220 abortions per month in the second half of 2023, mainly through travel – more than in 2020, when they received around 140 per month. For Louisiana residents, monthly abortion rates were about the same, at just under 700 from July through December 2023, mainly through shield laws, and 635 in 2020. Oklahoma residents underwent fewer abortions in 2023, with the monthly number dropping from about 690 in 2020 to less than 470.
One of the leading providers of telehealth pills is the Massachusetts Abortion Access Project. Co-founder Angel Foster said the group was prescribing drugs to about 500 patients a month from its launch in September 2023 through last month, mostly in states with bans.
The group charged $250 per person, while people could pay less if they couldn’t afford it. Starting this month, with the help of grants that pay for operating costs, it is trying a different approach: setting the price at $5 but telling patients they value more for those who can afford it. Foster said the group is on track to achieve 1,500 to 2,000 abortions per month with the new model.
Foster called the 2020 Supreme Court decision “a human rights and social justice catastrophe,” while also saying that “there is an irony in what has happened in the post-Dobbs landscape.”
“In some places, abortion care is more accessible and affordable than before,” she said.
There have been no major legal challenges to shield laws so far, but abortion opponents have tried to take one of the most important pills off the market. Earlier this year, the US The Supreme Court unanimously upheld access against the drug mifepristone, while finding that a group of anti-abortion doctors and organizations did not have the legal right to challenge the drug’s 2000 federal approval.
This month, three states asked a judge for permission to file a lawsuit reversing federal decisions making access to the pill easier – including via telehealth.
