A six-week abortion ban in Florida led to a sharp drop in the number of abortions provided in the state and drove down national trends too, a new report shows.
Monthly abortions in Florida were cut by more than 30% after a ban on procedures after six weeks of pregnancy was implemented in May, according to the report from the Guttmacher Institute, a research and policy organization focused on sexual and reproductive health that supports abortion rights. There were an average of about 5,400 abortions in the state each month in May and June, down from more than 8,000 a month in the first three months of the year.
Nationwide, average monthly abortions fell 7% in that time – a difference of about 7,000 fewer abortions each month – and the drop in Florida accounted for more than a third of that decline.
There are seasonal fertility patterns and some month-to-month fluctuation in abortion rates, experts say. But data from Guttmacher suggests that the changes in Florida were drastic; in other states without total abortion bans, the estimated number of abortions dipped only 2% in May and 9% in June.
The tighter restrictions in Florida were expected to reverberate through the state and the broader region. More than 1 in 10 abortions in the country happened in Florida before the more restrictive policy took effect in May, and it had become a key abortion access point for the South in the years since the US Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision revoked the federal right to an abortion in 2022.
In 2023, about 9,000 people traveled from out of state to receive an abortion in Florida, according to Guttmacher estimates – many coming from states with more restrictive bans, including Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia.
Despite the recent declines, Guttmacher estimates show that there have been more abortions in the US the first half of 2024 than there were in the first half of 2023 – and abortions reached the highest rate in more than a decade last year.
But the abortion landscape continues to change rapidly in the US, and it’s not clear what pattern will hold through the end of the year, said Isaac Maddow-Zimet, a data scientist with the Guttmacher Institute who worked on the new report.
“Many organizations, institutions and people have sprung up to really support the needs of abortion-seekers in the US,” he said. “I think that the scale of it is really clear in the ways in which abortion numbers have gone up in states without bans. There has been much more funding available and other modes of care, like telehealth, that really speaks to the ways in which people may be able to access care now in those states that may not have been able to before. At the same time, of course, access has gotten tremendously worse in banned states.”
In April, a month before the six-week ban took effect, abortions in Florida jumped more than 20% higher than the average for the first three months of the year, Guttmacher data shows.
“Providers and patients went to great lengths to provide and access care, respectively, before the law went into effect,” according to the new report.
But the influx of funding that has helped overcome new barriers to access and the longstanding barrier of cost in the wake of the Dobbs decision may not be sustainable, Maddow-Zimet said.
Florida is also one of at least 10 states where voters will have the chance to determine the future of abortion access in their state in elections this November. But ongoing changes to abortion policies in the two years since the Dobbs decision have created widespread confusion among women in the US.
“When people need abortions, it’s within a very short time period. And the pace of legal change can be very slow,” Maddow-Zimet said. “Ballot measures could potentially increase access but would come too late for people who are pregnant right now.”
Lacking the federal protection of Roe v. Wade, a growing share of women are choosing to remove any chance that they could get pregnant at all.
The number of women choosing to tie or remove their fallopian tubes, a permanent form of contraception, increased after the Dobbs decision – especially in states with abortion bans and restrictions, according to a research letter published in the medical journal JAMA on Wednesday.
The researchers analyzed millions of medical records through December 2022. They found that tubal sterilization use rose nationwide immediately after the Supreme Court ruling, and it continued to increase 3% each month in states with abortion bans.
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It’s possible that increased use of permanent contraception could affect abortion trends, but barriers to this type of care – including medical, social and economic challenges – overlap with the barriers to abortion care, said Amanda Jean Stevenson, a demographer and assistant professor of sociology at the University of Colorado-Boulder who was not involved with the new reports.
“Being able to access wanted reproductive healthcare is subject to similar barriers across the board,” she said, particularly stigmatization and cost. “Therefore, the people who are impacted by the barriers are the same people – so the people who are able to access sterilization are probably mostly going to be people who would have been able to access abortion if they got pregnant.”