As States Banned Abortion, Thousands More Americans Got Pills Online Anyway – By Maggie Koerth and Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux (FiveThirtyEight) / Nov 1, 2022
On Sunday, FiveThirtyEight published data showing that there were at least 10,000 fewer legal abortions in July and August than before the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade. Those numbers — from #WeCount, a research project funded by the nonprofit Society of Family Planning, which supports abortion rights — provided a detailed, if incomplete, picture of how abortion has changed in the United States since the Dobbs decision in June.
One key question was left unanswered, though: How many of the people unable to get a legal abortion got one another way?
A new research paper released today begins to answer that question. It shows that Aid Access, an international abortion pill service that distributes medication abortion in places where it’s illegal, received a combined total of 6,533 more requests for pills from the United States in July and August 2022, with each month compared to an April 2022 baseline.1 Previous analysis of Aid Access data suggests that about 50 to 60 percent of requests result in completed abortions, which would mean at least an additional 3,267 abortions in July and August combined, compared to that April baseline. While this estimate is inexact, the increase demonstrates the role that self-managed abortion now plays in shaping abortion access in America.
CONTINUE: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/medication-abortion-after-dobbs/
