More than 171,000 women traveled out of state to have abortions in 2023, according to data from the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute.
Guttmacher’s Monthly Abortion Provision Study project — which estimates the number of abortions between January of 2023 and March of 2024 in states without total abortion restrictions — found that out-of-state travel for abortion has more than doubled since 2019, when 73,100 women crossed state lines for abortions, USA Today reported of the study.
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After the Supreme Court issued its Dobbs decision in 2022, which overturned the court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that had invented a federal right to abortion for 50 years, it sent the issue of abortion back to individual states. Since then, individual states have chosen to either limit or broaden abortion laws.
Guttmacher found that women, mostly residents of southern states with tighter abortion restrictions, traveled across several states to have an abortion or obtain abortion pills.
“Historically, however, many of the people traveling from restrictive states went to states that now have total abortion bans,” the Guttmacher Institute said in a news release. “For instance, in 2020, more than 800 Louisiana residents traveled to Texas for abortion care; following the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022, that was no longer possible. In 2023, more than 3,500 Louisianans traveled across multiple states to get care in places like Florida, Illinois, and Georgia.”
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The state that saw the most women leave for abortions in 2023 was Texas, the pro-abortion organization found. According to the data, more than 14,000 Texas women went to New Mexico for abortions, and several thousand others went across several states to have abortions.
Illinois, which has been made into an abortion haven after the end of Roe, received the most women from out of state seeking abortions. The organization found that roughly 37,300 women came from 16 states to Illinois for abortions.
Vice president for public policy at the Guttmacher Institute Kelly Baden noted that Florida played a large role in “maintaining some level of abortion access in the Southeast” in 2023. There were approximately 85,000 abortions in the state last year — a figure that is expected to drop because of the state’s six-week abortion restriction that went into effect in May. The closest state to Florida that allows unborn babies to be killed in abortions past six weeks is North Carolina, according to Guttmacher.
Overall, Guttmacher found that more than 1 million unborn babies were killed in clinician-performed abortions in 2023.
Katherine Hamilton is a political reporter for Breitbart News. You can follow her on X @thekat_hamilton.