(LifeSiteNews) –– The pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute released a new report Tuesday on the state of abortion in 2024, finding that overall abortions rose while travel across state lines to commit them decreased.
The 2024 data finds 1,038,100 “clinician-provided abortions” in states without abortion bans, an increase just under 1% from 2023, including both surgical procedures and medication abortions.
“In 2024, approximately 155,000 people crossed state lines for an abortion, representing 15% of all abortions provided in states without total bans,” the report adds, an approximately 9% drop from more than 169,000 in 2023. Illinois, North Carolina, Kansas, and New Mexico were the largest destinations for abortion travel.
“The latest abortion travel data are a clear reminder that the impact of a state’s abortion policies extends far beyond its borders,” Kimya Forouzan, Guttmacher Institute principal state policy advisor, said. “For instance, the substantial increase in out-of-state abortion patients in Virginia can likely be attributed to Florida’s six-week ban that went into effect in May 2024. Despite being hundreds of miles away, Virginia is the second-closest state for Florida residents to seek an abortion after six weeks’ gestation and the closest without a mandatory waiting period.”
The findings appears to affirm that direct abortion bans can impact the ability to obtain surgical abortions, but the distribution of abortion pills by mail, including across state lines and into jurisdictions where abortion pills are illegal, continues to effectively undermine state abortion bans, and will continue to do so until pill distribution is shut down at the national level. Alternately, the data may indicate that simply getting abortion pills mailed to one’s home eliminates the “need” to go out of state.
13 states currently ban all or most abortions. But the abortion lobby is working feverishly to cancel out those deterrents via pill distribution, legal protection and financial support of interstate abortion travel, constructing new abortion facilities near borders shared by abortion-restrictive and pro-abortion states, making liberal states sanctuaries for those who want to evade or violate the laws of more pro-life neighbors, and enshrining abortion “rights” in state constitutions.
The abortion lobby has made unregulated, no-oversight pill distribution key to the cause of perpetuating abortion-on-demand regardless of the risks to the women they are supposedly serving.
In November 2022, Operation Rescue reported that a net decrease of 36 abortion facilities in 2022 led to the lowest number in almost 50 years, yet the chemical abortion business “surged” with 64 percent of new facilities built last year specializing in dispensing mifepristone and misoprostol.
This is despite the fact that a 2020 open letter from a coalition of pro-life groups to then-US Food & Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Stephen Hahn noted that the FDA’s own adverse reporting system says the “abortion pill has resulted in over 4,000 reported adverse events since 2000, including 24 maternal deaths. Adverse events are notoriously underreported to the FDA, and as of 2016, the FDA only requires abortion pill manufacturers to report maternal deaths.”
“A November 2021 study by Charlotte Lozier Institute scholars appeared in the peer-reviewed journal Health Services Research and Managerial Epidemiology,” writes Catholic University of America research associate Michael New. “They analyzed state Medicaid data of over 400,000 abortions from 17 states that fund elective abortions through their Medicaid programs. They found that the rate of abortion-pill-related emergency-room visits increased over 500 percent from 2002 through 2015. The rate of emergency-room visits for surgical abortions also increased during the same time period, but by a much smaller margin.’”
Whether the issue will be resolved nationally remains to be seen. President Donald Trump has taken a number of pro-life actions since returning to office, but said on the campaign trail that he would not enforce federal law prohibiting abortion pills from being dispensed by mail. Pro-lifers hope statements by his Health & Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. about reviewing the science behind abortion pills may mark the beginning of a reversal.
