Story at a glance
- New data reveals many abortion clinics across 11 states that have either banned or restricted abortion have been forced to close down.
- Before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, there were 71 clinics across those 11 states that were still providing abortion care.
- By July 24, one month after the court’s decision, there were only 43 left still operating and providing abortions.
It has been 30 days since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that abortion is not a constitutional right, and new data reveals it forced 43 abortion clinics to stop offering services to people all across the country.
Data collected by the Guttmacher Institute, an abortion policy and advocacy group, found that the number of clinics offering abortion care dropped sharply in states that implemented a total or six-week abortion ban in the first month following the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe.
Abortion clinic closures predominantly occurred in the South and Midwest across 11 states, each of which have either outlawed abortion completely or implemented six-week bans — including Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Ohio and more.
Prior to the court’s decision to overturn Roe, these eleven states collectively had 71 clinics providing abortion care but by July 24 there were only 28 still offering abortions — the number of clinics dropping by 43 within one month.
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In a state like Texas, where abortion is completely banned, there were previously 23 abortion clinics operating on June 24, and within 30 days that dropped down to just one clinic still providing abortion care.
There are currently seven states that have imposed total bans on abortion since June 24, and Guttmacher found they accounted for 80,500 abortions in 2020 — an average of about 6,700 abortions every month.
Abortion providers were forced to make tough decisions after the U.S. Supreme Court on June 24 published a decision on the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case, which concluded that abortion was not a constitutional right. The decision overturned Roe v. Wade, a 1973 case that affirmed abortion access in the U.S. for nearly 50 years.
There were 13 states ready to act, with legislation known as trigger laws ready to take effect and make abortion illegal or severely restricted as soon as Roe was overturned.
Though lawsuits were filed in a handful of states to stop restrictive abortion laws from taking effect, the court’s decision put thousands of abortion clinics in a precarious position: Stop providing abortion care or face potential felony charges.
Less than two weeks before the court’s decision to overturn Roe was published, Guttmacher also found that abortions in the U.S. increased for the first time in 30 years.
In 2020, there were 930,160 abortions — equating to about 1 in 5 pregnancies ending in abortion.
Guttmacher predicts that more states could adopt abortion bans in the coming weeks and months, further deteriorating abortion access in the U.S.
Even before the court struck down Roe, getting an abortion in the U.S. wasn’t easy, with about 81,000 people out of 930,000 traveling out of state to receive abortion care in 2020.
Rachel Jones, principal research scientist at Guttmacher, explained that states like Kentucky and Florida have begun rolling back abortion access by implementing 15-week abortion bans, while Wisconsin is still weighing the legality of the state’s 1849 pre-Roe abortion ban. All that uncertainty “has caused providers to stop offering abortion care. In total, as many as 26 states are certain or likely to ban abortion now that Roe is no longer in place.”
Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin just recently announced it would no longer provide abortion care amid the state’s uncertainty over abortion and instead has partnered with neighboring Planned Parenthood of Illinois to offer Wisconsin residents abortion care out-of-state.
Published on Jul 28,2022