17 Million Women Have Lost Abortion Access Since The Supreme Court Overturned Roe

In the two months since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, more than a dozen states have banned or severely restricted access to abortion ― leaving millions of people without critical health care.

Seventeen states have banned, severely restricted or stopped offering access to abortion care since the court took away federal abortion protections in June’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision.

That means that of the 75 million American women of reproductive age, nearly 30 million have limited or no access to abortion, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a pro-abortion rights research organization. Around 17 million of those women live in states where lawmakers have either completely banned abortion care or providers have stopped offering it due to uncertainty around abortion laws. These numbers only increase when including transgender, nonbinary and genderqueer people who are able to get pregnant.

“These bans mean that every one of these millions of people, should they need an abortion, will have to overcome extreme logistical and financial barriers to access care,” Elizabeth Nash, a principal policy associate at the Guttmacher Institute, said in a recent statement. “Abortion is an essential component of reproductive health care that was already difficult to achieve pre-Dobbs, but is now even more challenging or outright impossible for many.”

Eleven states are currently enforcing near-total abortion bans: Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Idaho, Louisiana, Tennessee, Texas, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Dakota and Missouri. Some of these near-total bans were implemented through trigger laws, while others went into effect through pre-Roe restrictions that immediately took effect after the Dobbs decision came down in June.

All of the near-total bans have extremely limited exceptions. Some, like Tennessee’s and South Dakota’s, have no exceptions for rape or incest, and those that do require victims to report to law enforcement before they can access abortion care. All of the abortion bans have exceptions to save the life of a pregnant person, but many of those exceptions, like those in Missouri and Texas, are intentionally vague and create a powerful incentive for physicians not to provide lifesaving care until the pregnant person is at death’s door, for fear of consequences like losing their license or facing lawsuits and criminal penalties.

Other states are enforcing abortion restrictions in the wake of Roe’s demise….