Abortion access in a post-Roe America

When abortion bans go into effect and why pills are the next fight

Roe v. Wade had held that states could not ban abortion before “viability” - the point at which a fetus is viable outside the womb, generally viewed by doctors as between 24 and 28 weeks.

With the Roe precedent now overturned, a patchwork of abortion access is emerging as each state decides how much time to give women to access abortion services.

The 13 states with trigger bans already have or will soon reduce the time to obtain an abortion down from as much as 28 weeks to zero – a total ban.

According to the Guttmacher Institute, a research and policy organization that supports abortion rights, seven additional states have in place abortion laws based on gestational age that had been considered unconstitutional under Roe and are currently blocked by courts. State courts could revisit these cases and shorten the time available to get an abortion.

Florida and Arizona enacted 15-week bans earlier this year which are set to take effect in July and late summer, respectively.

The states that have banned or are likely to attempt to ban abortion access generally have higher proportions of women who lack health insurance or are impoverished - or both. Insurance marketplace TrueCoverage estimates childbirth costs for an uninsured woman in the United States to be $10,000-$20,000, depending on the state. The costs of raising a child are also significant. Families should expect to spend close to $300,000 for food, shelter and other necessities to raise a child through the age of 17, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Medication-induced abortions have become more common over the past decade, with use of this method before nine weeks of pregnancy increasing 123% between 2010 and 2019. In such an abortion, a woman takes a series of pills to end a pregnancy rather than undergoing a surgical procedure. The states that have banned or plan to ban abortion may face difficulties enforcing restrictions on medication abortions because women are still likely to be able to obtain the pills online or in other states.

"In a world without Roe, medication abortion becomes the big challenge for these states that want to regulate abortions out of existence," said Greer Donley, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law who is an expert on reproductive rights.

By

Travis Hartman, Ally J. Levine and Sam Hart

Sources

Guttmacher Institute; Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health (ANSIRH); U.S. Census Bureau; Reuters reporting; U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office on Women’s Health

Edited by

Feilding Cage and Will Dunham