Study: 24,000 Fewer Abortions in U.S. Following Dobbs Decision

A new study estimates there were 24,290 fewer legal abortions between July 2022 and March 2023, after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision. 

FiveThirtyEight obtained the study from #WeCount, which is a national research project led by the Society of Family Planning, a nonprofit that supports research about abortion and contraception. That study found that there were more than 24,000 fewer abortions compared to a pre-Dobbs baseline. #WeCount made its estimate by contacting every abortion clinic in the country multiple times over a twelve-month period. 

The study found that there were approximately 93,575 fewer abortions in states that limited abortion for at least one week in the nine-month period after Roe v. Wade was overturned. At the same time, the number of legal abortions in states where abortion remained legal rose by 69,285 in the same period. That shift signals “that many people did travel and successfully obtain an abortion within the U.S. health care system,” according to the report. 

“Underneath these topline trends, meanwhile, is a huge amount of variability by state. Some parts of the country, like the Northeast and the Pacific Northwest, have seen relatively small changes,” FiveThirtyEight reported of the study. “But a handful of states bordering the large swath of the South where an abortion is almost impossible to obtain are absorbing large numbers of new patients. There were 12,460 additional abortions in Florida in the nine months after Dobbs, 12,580 additional abortions in Illinois and 7,975 additional abortions in North Carolina.”

While #WeCount did not collect data about the state of residence for women seeking abortions, data from state public health departments shows that more people traveled after the Supreme Court’s decision to obtain abortions.

“In Colorado, the share of out-of-state patients doubled in one year, from 14 percent in 2021 to 28 percent in 2022, when 17 percent of Colorado’s abortion patients were from Texas alone. In Florida, 9 percent of abortions that happened in the first three months of 2023 were performed on out-of-state residents, up from 8 percent in 2022 and 6 percent in 2021,” according to the report.