The rate at which women cross state lines to obtain abortions continues to rise, according to a study from the Guttmacher Institute, a pro-abortion policy organization.
More than 92,000 women crossed into other states to obtain abortions in the first six months of 2023, marking an increase from nearly 41,000 women in a comparable half of 2020. The study therefore indicates that the share of women seeking to murder their babies in an abortion clinic outside of their home states has increased to one in five from one in ten.
The phenomenon continues to accelerate more than one year after the Supreme Court overturned the Roe v. Wade decision, which asserted that abortions are protected by the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution. Some states have increased restrictions on abortion after the decision, while others have further deregulated the lethal practice.
The study from the Guttmacher Institute found that Illinois has “experienced the largest increase, by far, in the number of patients traveling from out of state” for abortions: nearly 19,000 women traveled to Illinois for abortions in the first six months of 2023, an increase from almost 6,000 in a comparable six months of 2020. The state is surrounded by others with comparatively stricter regulations on abortion.
New Mexico, Colorado, Florida, and Ohio have followed Illinois with respect to abortion increases driven by women from other states, a practice fueled by activists who have launched nonprofits and fundraisers to cover travel expenses. Several large corporations also pay for their female employees to travel outside of their home state to murder their babies.
The analysis only considered abortions handled in the “formal healthcare system,” meaning that the data did not cover increased demand for abortion pills, which surpassed surgical abortions as the most popular method to murder preborn babies in the United States three years ago. The substances have contributed to an increased overall national abortion rate in the past year.
Another recent study from the University of Texas at Austin found that “every state, regardless of abortion policy, showed a higher request rate” for abortion pills after the decision to overturn Roe v. Wade was leaked and then formally announced. The largest increases were observed in states which had purportedly banned abortion: the states with the most salient increases in abortion pill orders were Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, Alabama, and Oklahoma.
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.”
