In the month of March 2024 alone, 1,650 clinician-provided abortions took place in New Mexico, according to the reproductive research organization, the Guttmacher Institute.
Prior to the Dobbs decision, in which the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, New Mexico abortion clinics averaged about 3,000 abortions a year. The state has seen a 256 percent increase in abortions since 2020.
During the one year after the court overturned Roe, the Guttmacher Institute estimates that 20,950 clinician-provided abortions took place in New Mexico.
The Guttmacher Institute estimates that 14,200 individuals from Texas traveled to New Mexico for an abortion last year.
With abortion care banned or severely restricted in 14 states, self-managed care is also on the rise, a public health researcher said.
Suzanne Bell, assistant professor in the Department of Population, Family and Reproductive Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told NM Political Report, that there is evidence that self-managed abortion care is on the rise in the U.S. as a result of restrictions and bans on abortion care.
So far, 41 states have a gestational limit on abortion and 14 states have banned it completely, according to the reproductive research nonprofit the Guttmacher Institute. Texas bans it with few exceptions. Arizona currently restricts it after 15 weeks.
New Mexico is one of only nine states, plus the District of Columbia, that does not place gestational restrictions on abortion.
Bell said that while it’s too soon to show hard data, there is growing evidence that self-managed abortion care has increased in response to the bans and restrictions.
“We don’t have comprehensive information but there is evidence that it is a growing share of abortions that occur in the U.S. in states that have banned or restricted it pre-viability. I can’t speak to what the percentages are, but it is a growing trend in the last couple of years,” Bell said.
She said that the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision on Thursday, in which the court ruled the plaintiffs did not have standing against the FDA, would not have ended abortion medication even if the decision had gone the other way. The second of two-step regime, misoprostol, can be used alone to terminate a pregnancy.
But, misoprostol, when used by itself to terminate a pregnancy, is slightly less efficacious than the two-step method and carries greater side effects when used alone to terminate a pregnancy, Bell said.
Bell said there are websites that offer medication abortion through telehealth. Mini Timmaraju, president and chief executive officer for the reproductive rights organization, Reproductive Freedom for All, said during a White House press call on Thursday that conservatives are trying to use the Comstock Act, a law enacted under Pres. Ulysses S. Grant’s presidency, to ban abortion through telehealth by trying to “jail doctors and patients for receiving abortion medication in the mail.”
“One in three women of reproductive age now live under an abortion ban,” she said.
Bell said there is a scientific study that “provides really compelling evidence of the negative effects of being denied an abortion.”
She said being unable to obtain an abortion affects an individual’s financial health, mental health and physical health.
Health outcomes for women of color are disproportionately impacted by structural inequities in the U.S. healthcare system, with Black women at two-to-three times greater risk of death during pregnancy when compared to white women, Bell said.
Julie Chavez Rodriguez, senior advisor and assistant to President Joe Biden and director of White House intergovernmental affairs, said during the White House press call on Thursday that conservatives have published a policy blueprint if former Pres. Donald Trump wins the election in November and it would include banning medication abortion, through the Comstock Act, in all 50 states, including in states where abortion is safe and legal.
The court fight over mifepristone may not be over. Three states, Idaho, Kansas and Missouri, tried to join the plaintiff’s case against the FDA but the Supreme Court rejected that effort. But a lower court judge in Texas allowed those states to intervene.
This has led legal experts to say that there could be a new lawsuit around mifepristone in the future.
