Last month, in Pittsburg, Kan., a city of about people mere minutes from the borders of both Missouri and Oklahoma. Health Brief is a coproduction of The Washington Post and KFF Health News.
It’s the second new clinic the regional affiliate has opened in Kansas in a little over two years, to accommodate the growing number of patients coming from Texas, Missouri, Oklahoma, Arkansas and even Louisiana. For many people in the South, Kansas is now the nearest place to get a legal abortion. Fourteen states have with few exceptions since the Supreme Court’s decision in 2022 left policies on abortion to the states.
Many more have limited access. And yet, the estimated number of abortions in the United States last year , the highest number in a decade, according to the , a national nonprofit that supports abortion rights. That’s due in part to the efforts of groups such as Planned Parenthood Great Plains to fill the void left in the states with bans.
, according to Guttmacher. That’s a big jump after even though the share of out-of-state patients has been . Not all of the increase in abortions comes from interstate travel, of course.
Telehealth has made medication abortions easier to obtain without traveling. The , including those involving the medication mifepristone, has risen. And Guttmacher data scientist said the majority of the overall abortion increase in recent years came from those in states without total bans.
The increased attention on the issue since and efforts to expand access for people in the states with bans bolstered access for people locally as well. “That speaks, in a lot of ways, to the way in which abortion access really wasn’t perfect pre- ,” Maddow-Zimet said. “There were a lot of obstacles to getting care.
” Abortion opponents, meanwhile, hailed an estimated drop in the procedure in the 14 states with near-total bans. “It’s encouraging that pro-life states continue to show massive declines in their in-state abortion totals, with a drop of over abortions since ,” , a spokeswoman for , wrote in a statement. Organizations in states where abortion remains legal feel the ripples of every new ban almost instantly.
One Planned Parenthood affiliate with a clinic in southern Illinois, for example, reported a roughly increase in call volume in the two weeks following the enactment of in May. Both sides now await the next round of policy decisions on abortion, which voters will make in November. Ballot initiatives in .
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