AILSA CHANG, HOST:
Ever since the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade in 2022, anti-abortion rights advocates have worked to pass laws and file court cases that would block abortion access. Well, a new report finds that those efforts have not worked in one basic way. The number of abortions in the U.S. hasn't budged. Here's NPR's Selena Simmons-Duffin.
SELENA SIMMONS-DUFFIN, BYLINE: In Atlanta, Georgia, in January of last year...
VIV: I took a test. I was pregnant.
SIMMONS-DUFFIN: This is Viv (ph). She's 27 years old. NPR agreed not to use her last name because she fears repercussions for talking about her experience. She went to get an ultrasound, knowing that abortion is banned in Georgia after six weeks of pregnancy.
VIV: The ultrasound tech told me that I was six weeks and three days. So I was like, OK, I can't get an abortion in Georgia.
SIMMONS-DUFFIN: She went online and looked through posts on Reddit, trying to figure out what to do.
VIV: And I found out that I could get an abortion pill shipped to my house. And I didn't want to travel. I didn't want to take time off of work. I am pretty knowledgeable about women's health care. I know that the abortion pill is a safe and effective way to have an abortion.
SIMMONS-DUFFIN: Since the Supreme Court's Dobbs decision, two key things changed. The Food and Drug Administration under President Biden allowed mifepristone, one of the medications used for abortion, to be prescribed through telemedicine. And states that support abortion rights passed shield laws, which protect health care providers from legal risks when they prescribe to patients in states with bans. Viv ended up reaching out to a group called The Massachusetts Medication Abortion Access Project.
VIV: You basically go on their website, you answer questions, and then you pay whatever fee you can afford, which I thought was really, really cool.
SIMMONS-DUFFIN: About a week later, she received two medications in the mail - mifepristone and misoprostol.
VIV: It has very, very thorough directions. People contact you after to make sure everything's good, and then they even have people contact you, like, a month after to make sure that you're not pregnant anymore. And yeah, that was it.
SIMMONS-DUFFIN: This process is a big reason why abortion bans have not managed to stop people from getting abortions. The Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit research organization that supports abortion access, just published a new analysis of abortion data from last year.
ISAAC MADDOW-ZIMET: There were an estimated 1,126,000 abortions provided by clinicians in the U.S. in 2025. That's pretty much unchanged from 2024.
SIMMONS-DUFFIN: Isaac Maddow-Zimet of Guttmacher says even though the overall number hasn't changed, there are shifts. The number of people traveling to have abortions has declined.
MADDOW-ZIMET: That coincided with a big increase in telehealth provision to those same states. And it makes sense that we'd see a decline in travel because people accessing abortion care through telehealth in general then no longer need to travel for care.
SIMMONS-DUFFIN: Abortion rights opponents view all of this as a huge problem. There are several legal challenges and a bill in Congress aiming to force the FDA to stop allowing mifepristone to be mailed to patients. One of those court challenges was brought by Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill, who told a Senate committee in January that the FDA rules must be changed.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
LIZ MURRILL: Until then, Louisiana's efforts to protect mothers and their unborn children and to hold out-of-state abortion pill traffickers accountable for the harm they inflict will be all but futile.
SIMMONS-DUFFIN: According to Guttmacher, there were about 2,500 abortions in Louisiana in 2023, and last year, there were over 9,000. Viv in Atlanta is grateful that telemedicine abortion was an option for her. She notes that Georgia has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the country.
VIV: So if a woman doesn't want to be pregnant, she should be able to have that right. And yeah, I think that should be the end of the story.
SIMMONS-DUFFIN: Selena Simmons-Duffin, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
