A year without Roe

It’s been very bad:

New estimates provided exclusively to FiveThirtyEight by #WeCount — a national research project led by the Society of Family Planning, a nonprofit that supports research on abortion and contraception — indicate that there were 24,290 fewer legal abortions between July 2022 and March 2023, compared to a pre-Dobbs baseline.¹ These people might have remained pregnant or obtained an abortion outside the legal system, which would not be captured in #WeCount’s data.

But the overall decline in abortions is just one part of the story. #WeCount’s estimates, which were collected by contacting every abortion clinic in the country multiple times over a period of twelve months, shows the Dobbs ruling has created intense turmoil for tens of thousands of Americans across the country. There were an estimated 93,575 fewer legal abortions in states that banned or severely restricted abortion for at least one week in the nine-month period after Dobbs.² The number of legal abortions in states where abortion remained mostly available did rise by 69,285 in the same period, signaling that many people did travel and successfully obtain an abortion within the U.S. health care system. “But a significant number of people are trapped and can’t get out of places like Texas,” said Caitlin Myers, a professor of economics at Middlebury College who studies abortion policy and reviewed the #WeCount data at FiveThirtyEight’s request. “And for the people who are traveling, we’re talking about enormous distances. Some people are likely getting delayed into the second trimester.” With more bans on the horizon in big states like Florida — and abortion clinics and funds struggling to keep up in other states — abortion access seems likely to erode further in the second year after Dobbs.

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And the landscape could be poised to change yet again, thanks to a raft of new abortion restrictions passed during this year’s legislative sessions. In the first five months of 2023, seven states passed full bans or first-trimester abortion restrictions, including Florida and North Carolina. (None of those restrictions were in effect while the #WeCount data was being collected.) The new gestational limit that is slated to become law in North Carolina on July 1 bans abortion after 12 weeks, which theoretically gives many people who want an abortion enough time to get one. But other changes to the law, like the requirement that patients receive an in-person state-mandated script about abortion risks 72 hours before their appointment, could pose a significant barrier to people traveling from out of state. “I just don’t think many patients are going to be traveling to North Carolina for care if they have to be here for several days,” said Amber Gavin, vice president of advocacy and operations at A Woman’s Choice, a network of clinics with locations in Florida and North Carolina.

And then there’s the Florida law, which will ban abortion after six weeks of pregnancy if the state Supreme Court upholds the 15-week ban currently being litigated. It’s impossible to say definitively how much abortions in Florida would decline under this scenario, but a FiveThirtyEight analysis suggests that it could result in many fewer legal abortions in the state. So far, Texas, Georgia, South Carolina and Ohio have implemented six-week bans since the fall of 2021.⁵ FiveThirtyEight found a remarkably consistent decline in all four states in the aftermath of the bans — in each, the number of abortions declined between 50 and 60 percent in the two months after the ban was implemented, compared to the two months before the ban went into effect. If the same pattern holds true for Florida, the impact could be massive, with a sudden decline of thousands of abortions in the state each month.

It may seem obvious that many states banning abortion would make it impossible for a considerable number of women to obtain an abortion while making it much more difficult for many more, but there was a whole genre of Savvy punditry devoted to the contrary argument. None of it ever made any sense, unless you just don’t think a woman’s reproductive autonomy is an important issue.