According to the Society of Family Planning, the number of abortions in the US went up after a dozen different states passed near-total abortion bans. The increase is entirely due to the growth of telehealth:
What's more surprising is that abortion bans haven't even reduced abortions in the states where they're banned. Women in those states have either traveled out of state or obtained abortion medication. The New York Times has the data:
Abortion bans produced a rush to make telehealth and medication easier and cheaper to get. Ironically, the result seems to have been a higher awareness of these alternatives and a net increase in abortions. The Supreme Court should never have poked the bear.
Clearly, stare-level abortion bans can never be effective unless states are allowed to prevent women of child bearing age from travelling out of state--at least without taking a pregnancy test. JD Vance has already endorsed this policy,
Given telehealth, it isn’t clear a travel ban would be effective.
That's what enforcing Comstock is for.
The medication has to get there somehow.
Travel bans aren’t that effective . . . now. But if T gets in and appoints “his” FDA/DOJ chiefs, how do you think another Mifepristone type lawsuit will go??? My guess is the same as suits against Jim Crow voter suppression tactics went- nowhere until 90 years later when the WhiteHouse and courts got liberal.
Along with rounding up "illegals" his new pro life team might as well also arrest those "law & order" defying women who cross a state line. She may now begin the appeals process through T’s appeals judges, DOJ and a 6-3 SCUS. "No problem Ms Doe, we should have it fair again in about 90 years."
GOP long ago stopped trying to appeal to more people. Now with voting security laws they’ll just make sure only the “correct” people can vote. Again good luck asking T’s DoJ to challenge that.
Good bye democracy, Hello T's Banana Republic. Sorry Ben, we saw the stats, fact checks, science and moral arguments, but we still believed "White Guys Back In Charge" was more important.
And 49?% of us still think that <:(
Praying for Kamala and that I’m all wrong on this
You seem to want to ignore that abortion bans were never meant to apply to upper middle class woman, only lower class woman. And out of state travel for abortions is often not an option for many lower class woman.
Even a national abortion ban would be fairly ineffective without a travel ban for pregnant women. Canada is at most a few hours airplane flight and a few hundred dollars for a ticket from anywhere in the US (even Honolulu is only five hours flying time from Vancouver) and Canada has no abortion laws. You can bet that if the US banned abortion, many abortion clinics would appear in every Canadian city with an air connection to the US, conveniently handy to the local airport.
The bear had to first be brought the Supreme Court by the anti-abortionists.
Why risk a pregnancy if your life is unstable and you won't be able to get an abortion if you even hesitate? Of course more women are having medical abortions as soon as they can.
Women have always done this. Fennel seeds, for instance. Queen Anne's Lace.
The old herbals of Christian monks are filled with recipes and plants for bringing on the menses.
Most don't work, though. If they did, someone would have patented the extraction process.
It varies and depends on how far the pregnancy has progressed. Some don't work at all, just quackery. Others -- carrot-family seeds -- work in doses high enough to make the patient horribly sick.
Nothing compares to the efficacy and safety of modern medications.
No problem. UFN please show ID to purchase Fennel seeds, Queen Anne's Lace, carrot family seeds, . . . anything else? Then DOJ can crosscheck those Rxs against that woman having a miscarriage, or traveling out of state. Just want you folks to be safe
The point is that women have always tried to control their fertility.
Long before we debated abortion.
And the bits of women's attempts that aren't lost to history are the gardens of Jesuit Monks, documented in their herbals, not to mention many other medical treatise.
That the attempts often failed does nothing to dismiss the agency women have tried to hold over their reproductive lives through history.
It should be no surprise that more women get abortions now, the tighter the rules get, the more they will opt out of the risks of pregnancy.
Seriously. You do realize patents only apply for 20 years, and didn't apply to strictly to inventions til 1624. And even then you had to be doing the king a favor to get your invention patented.
"the old herbals"
Ah, you've been reading too much "A Song of Ice and Fire", where "moon tea" is always available and always works 100%. That is, unless you missed the part about Lysa Tully, who nearly died from the potion and remained traumatized for life.
Also, a woman's health may not have been "precarious" until she became pregnant. Happens frequently, as it turns out.
No, I read the old herbals themselves. Never read any of the Game of Throne books or watched the shows, too violent for my taste.
There's a reason the early novels, Austen and Bronte's novels had no mothers; they died of too many pregnancies and complications of pregnancies. Widowed husbands, from wives lost to childbirth, used to be every bit as common as the loss of young men gone to battle; both rates as high as 20% in some times.
But this isn't fiction, this is really history, and please don't deman it with GOT, that's just more bullshit from the patriarchy, pretending women don't have a history and making one up for them.
Okay; well, your opinion of how Game of Thrones is patriarchal BS indicates you haven't read it at all, which you admit to. I can't fault you for skipping the excessive violence, however. I've skipped a lot of teevie and movies for exactly that reason myself.
And yes, it's another reason the old fairy tales have so many "evil step mothers." Men taking new wives to replace the old ones and raise their existing child/children. It went without saying what happened to the previous wife. Everybody knew.
And many used to use pennyroyal and died.
Not only that, but the number of men and women seeking sterilization has jumped in the wake of Dobbs. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/apr/12/sterilizations-roe-v-wade
If it turns out that these stringent abortion bans have resulted in more White men getting vasectomies and White women getting tubal ligation procedures, further dampening the birthrate of White Americans, do you suppose conservatives will reverse themselves?
That's why Trump wants to give everyone IVF coverage and Musk is running around saying everyone needs to have more babies.
If you keep in mind the old adage "conservatism can never fail, it can only be failed", their next step is clear - take it away from voters altogether because the public is too stupid for democracy.
Reproduction control has also quickly evolved into a GOTV problem for them when it used to be an asset, which has dramatic down ballot implications.
The number of abortions has never really seemed to be the point for the anti-abortion crowd. For a long time the pro-choice side thought they could find common ground with the anti-abortion crowd by working to make abortion rare, in the old formulation but found no interest in programs that would reduce the number of abortions by reducing the demand for them. The point always seemed to be to have the law endorse their view that abortion is wrong. And that is what states have done, even if it kills a few women who were not trying to have abortions, and even if it meant that women had abortions, just not in legal clinics.
I doubt there are many anti-abortion activists who are put off by the fact that the number of abortions went up. They established that abortion is not a right in the US. And that is what they were after.
this seems correct
I've always thought this as well. They want abortion illegal, immoral, wrong, but not all that interested in whether they happen or not.
“For a long time the pro-choice side thought they could find common ground with the anti-abortion crowd by working to make abortion rare”
Which was a nonsense proposition. Sure, the liberal wish list of health care, sex education, contraceptive availability, etc might reduce abortions on the margin, but it was never going to change a million per year into an insignificant number like tens or hundreds (ie, “rare”) but rather only something like 500k-900k.
Since the post-Roe peak, the number of abortions in the US halved. That is a pretty significant fall, and happened without universal adoption of liberal programs.
No, you'd never get to 100 abortions in a year. There are far too many serious pregnancy complications and rapists to ever even imagine getting to a number that low. Trisomy 13 happens in about 500 pregnancies a year, and that is just one of many extremely serious complications. But dropping by another half or even 2/3 could be achieved.
And why would you need to get to 100 for something to be considered "rare" in a country of 330 million people?
Why would anyone be the least bit surprised at this? All they've really done is make women more aware of the many easy alternatives to surgical abortion. I predicted exactly this even before Dobbs. Next they'll want to restrict birth control and teen sex ed. and will be similarly befuddled as to why abortions and teenage pregnancies increased.
They've only begun to ban. Comstock, rescheduling of abortion drugs as equivalent of heroin, requirements for in-person visit for dispensing, drug-sniffing dogs in post offices....all these things are underway already. The number definitely will be down then if they're allowed to get their way.
They won’t stop. Their belief system is so far beyond rational that for the core group of religionists, they will work until they can dominate and impose their wacko beliefs. They are as radical and murderous in their own way as the Taliban.
And J.D. is their guy. A ruthless chameleon (yeah I know) without a core belief who will say anything and do anything for recognition and power. He really doesn’t care.
Knowing I'm once again too late to the party, suppose a "person", man or woman in gender ID, tries to bring on an abortion with some herbal preparation. It isn't entirely successful, or has painful, maybe life-threatening effects. So they go to the ER for help, right?
But the whole reason for the herbal potion was that abortions are illegal. As is care for "spontaneous" abortions, aka "miscarriages." Because that would be furthering an abortion! Will a doctor face the end of his medical career, revocation of license to practice, huge fines and probably jail time ... or fulfill some old Greek oath? What does Legal say? How high are the doctor's remaining debts from med school?
Women in these total ban states have found out the hard way that, unless they come through and deliver a healthy infant with few or no complications, they could be on their own.
What's up with Oklahoma? Have the Giliad commanders totally taken over?