More than 60 clinics across 15 US states have stopped offering abortions since the supreme court overruled Roe v Wade, the ruling which guaranteed the right, a new study found.
The court’s decision this summer, in Dobbs v Jackson, Mississippi, has prompted bans of most abortions in more than a dozen states. Other states are fighting over access to the procedure by suing to block enforcement of laws restricting abortion.
The new study by the Guttmacher Institute, a non-profit which works on reproductive rights advocacy and research, found that in 15 states with a previous total of 79 clinics that offered abortion, that number had dropped to 13 as of Sunday.
All the 13 clinics are in Georgia, where abortion is banned at about six weeks, when many women are unaware they are pregnant. In 14 states, no provider currently offers abortions, the study said.
Among the 66 clinics that no longer offer abortion, 40 still offer services that may include prescribing birth control or helping patients find abortion services in other states. But 26 have shut down completely.
“When clinics close down or stop offering abortion care, it represents a lost source of healthcare for their community,” the study said.
Joe Biden issued an executive order as a response to the Dobbs decision, including mandates to protect patient privacy, defend the right to travel for abortion care and protect the procedure in the case of emergency care.
Several obstetrician-gynecologists spoke this week at a meeting of the Reproductive Health Care Access taskforce, about the difficulties imposed by bans in their states.
“I have had teenagers with chronic medical conditions that make their pregnancy very high risk and women with highly desired pregnancies who receive a terrible diagnosis of a fetal anomaly cry when they learn that they can’t receive their abortion in our state and beg me to help them,” said Dr Nisha Verma, an obstetrician-gynecologist from Atlanta, Georgia.
The Guttmacher study found that in the 14 states where abortion is now unavailable, 125,780 abortions were performed in 2020. Patients seeking abortion care in such states must now travel.
Companies including Bank of America and Kroger have expanded job benefits to cover the cost for employees to travel to other states to access abortion care.
In Georgia, 41,620 abortions were obtained in 2020. The Guttmacher study mentions that the stringent timeframe to schedule and receive an abortion in Georgia leaves people with the same options as people in states with a total ban. More than 29% of US women of reproductive age live in states where abortion is banned or severely restricted.
The bans are overwhelming clinics in states where abortion is still legal.
Arizona is the latest state to make almost all abortions illegal, after a judge lifted a nearly 50-year-old injunction that blocked a near-total ban. Immediately after the ruling, several Arizona clinics stopped offering the procedure.
For Americans seeking other types of care, the supreme court decision has had second-hand effects. In some states, patients face delays and refusals in getting medications that can be used for abortions as well as the primary reason for being prescribed.
Some states require pharmacists to have a doctor’s permission before filling a prescription for medication that can also be used to stop pregnancies, such as methotrexate, which is also used to treat arthritis, even if such prescriptions have been refilled in the past.
Bans on abortion at any point are in place in 12 Republican-led states. Florida and Utah have bans that go into effect after 15 and 18 weeks gestation, respectively. Clinics in Wisconsin have stopped providing abortions, amid litigation over whether a ban passed in 1849 is in place.
Indiana, Ohio and South Carolina saw total or six-week bans go into effect briefly before they were temporarily blocked. The Guttmacher researchers said 26 states were likely to ban abortion within a year of Roe v Wade being overturned.
In Texas, 12 clinics have closed entirely while 11 are open without offering abortions. All three clinics that offered abortion in Louisiana have closed.
Reproductive rights are at issue across the US the 2022 midterm elections approach. Women and young people are expected to vote in bigger numbers than usual, given the appeal of the issue.
In Kansas, new-registered voters helped reject a constitutional amendment that would have said there was no right to an abortion in the state.
