Abortion levels in the United States rose significantly in the first six months of 2023 relative to a comparable period in 2020, according to newly released data from the Guttmacher Institute.

Some 511,000 preborn children were murdered nationwide between January and June of this year, an increase from 465,000 in the period from three years ago. The phenomenon comes despite the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, a development which had prompted various states to enact new legal regimes surrounding abortion.

The increase in abortions was attributable to a continually higher reliance on self-managed abortions. More than half of abortions in the United States occurred via abortion pills even before the overturn of Roe v. Wade, according to more data from the Guttmacher Institute.

The new data from the Guttmacher Institute counted “medication abortions that are prescribed via telemedicine by a doctor licensed in the United States and mailed to a patient in a state that allows telemedicine provision,” but did not track “abortions occurring without in-person or virtual contact with the formal health care system,” such as those who “obtain abortion pills from a community support network or websites that source pills from outside the United States.”

Aid Access, an organization based in Austria which sends abortion pills around the world, said in a July press release that more than 15,000 women from across the United States had requested pills through their service, including 3,500 women who live in states where abortion is purportedly banned. Mayday, a similar entity which is based in Massachusetts, hosted an abortion store in Texas to inform women how they could access abortion pills. The event occurred with permits from local officials despite nominal bans on the substances, according to a previous report from The Sentinel.

The increase in abortions also comes as women from Republican-led states with more restrictive laws travel into Democrat-led states with less restrictive laws to murder their children. States such as Illinois, Kansas, and Colorado, which are located near other states with more regulations, saw considerable increases in abortion rates over the past three years.

Conservative states, many of which have indeed heavily regulated surgical abortion centers after the overturn of Roe v. Wade, forbid officials from prosecuting mothers for the murder of their preborn children, even if the mothers willfully choose to order abortion pills without assistance or coercion from any other party. Oklahoma, for example, expressly bans the “charging or conviction of a woman with any criminal offense in the death of her own unborn child,” while Tennessee makes explicit that “the pregnant woman upon whom an abortion is performed or attempted” cannot be subjected to “criminal conviction or penalty.”