Report: Abortions rose nationally after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling

The number of abortions performed in the US rose in the year after the Supreme Court overturned its landmark Roe v. Wade ruling, despite several states restricting or outlawing the procedure, new data suggests.

About 2,200 more abortions took place in the healthcare system between July 2022 and June 2023, according to the Society of Family Planning (SFP)’s latest #WeCount report which compared abortion reporting trends from before and after the court’s June 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling. The data doesn’t include self-managed abortions or attempts to end pregnancy outside of the healthcare system, such as medication abortion.

“The increase in abortion numbers nationally is a complicated and nuanced finding and needs to be read alongside the decimation of access across wide reaches of the country and the underlying unmet need across the country, which are the result of decades of anti-abortion policies,” Ushma Upadhyay, a #WeCount cochair and professor at University of California, San Francisco’s Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health, told reporters this week.

The increase—an average of about 82,000 monthly abortions in the year following Dobbs compared to 82,115 in the months leading up to the decision—occurred amid varied state-level access to the procedure, the report noted. More than a dozen states saw a 100% decrease in abortions performed during that 12-month period.

States with total bans cumulatively reported almost 95,000 fewer clinician-provided abortions in the 12 months after Dobbs, according to the report. Meanwhile, those with six-week bans—including Ohio, South Carolina, and Georgia—saw almost 20,000 fewer abortions.

In states where the procedure remained legal with few restrictions, the estimated number of monthly clinician-provided abortions rose to an average of about 80,000 after Dobbs from about 70,000 before the court ruling—a cumulative increase of almost 117,000 abortions. Illinois saw the largest cumulative increase in abortions performed during that 12-month period with 21,500, followed by Florida (about 20,000) and North Carolina (about 12,000).

However, northeastern and northwestern states traditionally seen as abortion-friendly did not see the same surges in the procedure, likely due to factors such as travel distance, the report noted.

#WeCount cochair Alison Norris said although the data suggests many people traveled from ban states to those with fewer restrictions for abortion care, travel remains a hardship for many abortion seekers. Out-of-state abortions also likely didn’t account for all of the increase.

“It can be expensive, logistically complicated, and a traumatic experience,” Norris, who is also a professor at the Ohio State University’s Colleges of Public Health and Medicine, said in an October 24 conference call. “For people not able to travel, some have likely managed their abortions outside of the formal medical system.”

Although #WeCount does not include data on self-managed abortions, the report found that abortions provided by virtual-only clinics increased more than 70% following Dobbs—with a monthly average of almost 7,000, compared to 4,000 before the court’s decision.

A previous #WeCount report said that abortions had fallen by almost 26,000 in the nine months after the Supreme Court’s ruling. SFP officials attributed the new findings to more complete data collection methods and an increase in virtual-only clinics providing abortions.