Kansas health care facilities provided an estimated 22,720 abortions in 2024 — an increase of around 3,500, or 18.1%, from the year prior.
That’s according to a report published Tuesday by the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization that supports abortion rights.
A rise in patients traveling to Kansas from other states largely accounted for the increase. The report said 71% of people who get abortions in Kansas clinics are now residents of other states, the largest percentage of any state in the U.S. Most patients live in Texas, Missouri and Oklahoma, with smaller numbers from Arkansas and Louisiana.
“We've continued to see shifts further curtailing (abortion) access in the South and the Southeast of the United States,” said Kimya Forouzan, Guttmacher’s principal state policy adviser. “Often, states like Kansas are the closest for a lot of folks to get care.”
The increase also reflects expanded capacity at Kansas clinics, which have opened new branches and hired additional staff since demand for appointments exploded as a result of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which enabled many nearby states to ban abortion.
“It’s possible that some people, particularly Texas residents, might be able to access care in Kansas (who) might have otherwise traveled to New Mexico or Colorado,” said Isaac Maddow-Zimet, a data scientist for Guttmacher.
“It’s an example of the way that one state's capacity really doesn't live in isolation.”
Planned Parenthood Great Plains opened a new clinic in Pittsburg in August, and the organization opened another clinic in Kansas City, Kansas, in 2022. Independent clinic Aria Medical opened in Wichita in 2023.
“There’s still overwhelming demand,” said Emily Wales, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Great Plains. “On the weekends, we have more patients than we can ever serve.
“But we do have periods of time now — which seemed impossible a year or two ago — where we'll have a Tuesday or Wednesday that we're not filling entirely.”
The Guttmacher data is based on voluntary surveys of facilities that provide abortions combined with statistical modeling, and reflects procedural and medication abortions provided in brick-and-mortar and telehealth settings.
State data for 2023 documented a 58% increase in abortions from 2022.
The Kansas Department of Health and Environment is not expected to release its official count of abortions for 2024 until later this year. Officials did not release abortion statistics for 2023 until mid-December of 2024, several months later than they had released numbers in prior years.
Danielle Underwood, a spokesperson for the anti-abortion advocacy group Kansans for Life, criticized the state’s delayed release of that data.
“Kansans deserve the truth from our own government about the sharp increases in abortion here but are being kept in the dark,” she said in an emailed statement.
“Governor (Laura) Kelly and KDHE need to stop playing politics and release comprehensive, up-to-date statistics. Kansans have a right to know what’s happening inside our borders — and women deserve better than to be funneled here to abortion facilities with little to no accountability."
A law passed last year requiring the state to report abortion statistics twice yearly, within 30 days of the reporting period ending, has been temporarily blocked as part of a court challenge by health care clinics. The law would also require doctors who provide abortions to ask patients their reasons for ending their pregnancies — information that would be anonymized, reported to state officials and included in public reports.
Abortion is legal in Kansas until 22 weeks. Minors must get parental consent or a judge’s permission, and it’s illegal for many health insurance providers to cover the procedure. A number of other restrictions, including a 24-hour waiting period, are currently blocked due to a court challenge.
The Guttmacher study found that total abortion numbers in the U.S. remained relatively unchanged between 2023 and 2024.
Along with Kansas, other states that saw significant increases in abortion numbers were Arizona, California, Ohio and Virginia. Florida and South Carolina, which enacted six-week abortion bans midway through the year, saw sharp reductions.
The study did not include self-managed abortions coordinated outside of the official health care system, typically through abortion pills obtained by people living in states with abortion bans from doctors in states with shield laws or overseas sources. A report from 2022 indicated that the number of Kansans ordering abortion pills from the Austria-based organization Aid Access doubled in the months following the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
The study comes less than a week after Kansas lawmakers passed several new measures favored by anti-abortion advocates. Republicans overrode vetoes by the state’s Democratic governor to pass laws creating tax exemptions for fetuses and mandating fetal development education in some public school classes. They also increased the yearly taxpayer funding going to anti-abortion pregnancy resource centers from $2 million to $3 million.
Ongoing shifts in state abortion policy are expected to continue to impact abortion numbers in Kansas and the broader region. In November, Missouri voters decided to amend the state’s constitution to protect abortion rights. Several Planned Parenthood clinics in the state began offering abortions in February, after licensing restrictions that made it difficult for them to operate were blocked by a judge.
Wales says a ban on medication abortion in Missouri still restricts capacity in the state.
“We’re offering around 10 appointments (per day) when we have care available, but we’re still training staff,” she said. “We still have some patients who will choose to come to Kansas because they're anxious about not being able to change their mind the day of their procedure.”
