‘A SHOCK TO THE SYSTEM’

Legal Abortions Fell By 10,000 in Two Months After Fall of Roe, New Data Shows

“We got nearly 100 calls the day after the Dobbs decision from patients in Alabama,” the director of a clinic in Atlanta said.

Legal abortions across the United States declined by roughly 6 percent, or more than 10,000 individual cases, in the first eight weeks following the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, a new report has shown. The data, compiled by researchers with the Society of Family Planning’s #WeCount initiative, reflects what a co-author told The New York Times was “a shock to the system.” The number of legal procedures in the 13 states that have the most severely restricted access has fallen to almost zero since the June 24 decision, with rates in the states where abortions remain legal ballooning as some patients cross state lines to seek them out. As one director of an Atlanta clinic told FiveThirtyEight, which first reported the data: “We got nearly 100 calls the day after the Dobbs decision from patients in Alabama.” The data’s most consequential statistic of 10,000 fewer total abortions, though, demonstrates that many “felt they had no options” available to them in the weeks after the Roe decision, a professor at the University of California, San Francisco explained to FiveThirtyEight. “They couldn't travel, and they had to figure out what else to do,” she added.