A report from Five Thirty-Eight appears to show that 10,000 fewer abortions have occurred since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June.
“A data set shared exclusively with FiveThirtyEight shows that in the two months after the Supreme Court decision, there were 10,570 fewer abortions as compared to pre-Dobbs estimates,” the outlet reported. “That figure is a net, counting both declines in some states and increases in others, and it shows how a few states are absorbing some.”
As many as 15 states with strict abortion restrictions or outright bans saw sharp declines in the practice by 22,000, forcing as many as 12,000 women to aggregate their abortions out of state.
“Nationwide, the movement of abortions from states with bans and restrictions to those with fewer restrictions on access wasn’t enough to make up the shortfall,” the outlet noted.
If the trends continue to persist into next year, as many as 60,000 abortions could be prevented.
New data, exclusively shared with @FiveThirtyEight, indicates that at least 10,000 women were unable to get an abortion in July and August because of Dobbs. https://t.co/lJ9xQZ1FU1 pic.twitter.com/n5US9KObQ9
— Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux (@ameliatd) October 30, 2022
Overall, the data suggest that in July/August, over 20,000 women were unable to get an abortion in their home state because of post-Dobbs bans or restrictions. Some of those women appear to have traveled to states like IL and NC. But not everyone could make the trip.
— Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux (@ameliatd) October 30, 2022
Prior to the Dobbs decision, researchers identified as many as 27 “abortion deserts” in the United States — cities with populations over 50,000 where the nearest abortion clinic is 100 miles away — but those numbers rapidly climbed after the overturning of Roe, turning whole regions of the country into abortion deserts, with as many as 66 clinics closing since June.
In the pro-abortion states closest to states that have placed severe restrictions or have outright banned the practice, wait times at clinics to receive the procedure have also spiked, with some people traveling from Texas all the way to Minnesota.
“Texas was going to Oklahoma and then Oklahoma started coming to us,” Ashley Brink, director of the Trust Women clinic in Wichita, Kansas, told the outlet.
“Someone who lives three minutes, three miles from our clinic, is struggling to get an appointment and is now getting displaced to Colorado or Illinois,” Brink added.
In Colorado and New Mexico, the median wait times have jumped to over two weeks while wait times in Kansas have jumped to 13 weekdays. A Planned Parenthood clinic in Asheville, North Carolina, saw a 74 percent increase in patients with an average wait time for medication abortion shooting up to three weeks.
