When Roe v. Wade was overturned four years ago, many expected abortion rates to drop in the United States.
Nearly 20 states have adopted bans or broad restrictions on the procedure. Yet, the number of abortions nationwide is actually slightly higher than it was before the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision in 2022, according to KFF.
That increase can be largely attributed to the rise of telehealthcare, says Yvette Lindgren, a law professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City who studies the legal landscape of reproductive rights.
A majority of abortions today are completed with medication — a set of two pills, mifepristone and misoprostol, that cause the body to end and shed a pregnancy.
These pills are often prescribed during online appointments and sent to pregnant patients through the mail. That gives many patients, even those in states with abortion bans, access to the procedure.
But one area where the number has not risen is in cases of emergency, Lindgren and Greer Donley, a national expert on abortion and the law and professor at the University of Pittsburgh, assert in an essay forthcoming in the Southern California Law Review.
Abortions in the case of medical emergencies, the type that states with bans often still aim to protect, are harder to access since the fall of Roe v. Wade, they say. Doctors and hospitals have delayed care out of fear of legal ramifications.
“It is the irony of the post-Dobbs abortion landscape,” Lindgren told KCUR’s Up To Date.
The U.S. Supreme Court is considering whether to ban mifepristone, one of the pills used in medication abortions, from being sent through the mail. Mifepristone was first approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 2000.
But even if access is restricted, Donley says, abortion-by-mail providers will work around the ban by providing only misoprostol, a method that is slightly less effective.
“And that is another irony of this case, which is that a case completely and totally premised on patient safety will do nothing but lead to doctors forced to use a less effective medication abortion regimen,” Donley said. “It will not stop abortions. It will only make them slightly less effective.”
- Yvette Lindgren, professor of law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City
- Greer Donley, professor of law at the University of Pittsburgh
- Kimi Chernoby, chief operating officer and chief legal officer, FemInEm
