It’s now been two and a half years since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade and opened the door for states to implement bans.

The policies and their impact have been in flux ever since the ruling in Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.

Here’s a look at data on where things stand:

Abortions are slightly more common now than before Dobbs

Overturning Roe and enforcing abortion bans has changed how woman obtain abortions in the U.S.

But one thing it hasn’t done is put a dent in the number of abortions being obtained.

There have been slightly more abortions each month across the country recently than there were in the months leading up to the June 2022 ruling, even as the number in states with bans dropped to near zero.

“Abortion bans don’t actually prevent abortions from happening,” said Ushma Upadhyay, a public health social scientist at UC San Francisco.

But, she said, they do change care.

For women in some states, there are major obstacles to getting abortions — and advocates say that low-income, minority and immigrant women are least likely to be able to get them when they want.

For those living in states with bans, the ways to access abortion are through travel or abortion pills.

Pills become a bigger part of equation — and the legal questions

As the bans swept in, abortion pills became a bigger part of the equation.

They were involved in about half the abortions before Dobbs. More recently, it’s been closer to two-thirds of them, according to research by the Guttmacher Institute.

The uptick of that kind of abortion, usually involving a combination of two drugs, was underway before the ruling.

But now, it’s become more common for pill prescriptions to be made by telehealth. By the summer of 2024, about 1 in 10 abortions was via pills prescribed via telehealth to patients in states where abortion is banned.

As a result, the pills are now at the center of battles over abortion access.

This month, Texas sued a New York doctor for prescribing pills to a Texas woman via telemedicine. There’s also an effort by Idaho, Kansas and Missouri to roll back their federal approvals and treat them as “controlled dangerous substances,” and a push for the federal government to start enforcing a 19th century federal law to ban mailing them.

Travel for abortion has increased

Clinics have closed or halted abortions in states with bans.

But a network of efforts to get women seeking abortions to places where they’re legal has strengthened and travel for abortion is now common.

The Guttmacher Institute found that more than twice as many Texas residents obtained abortion in 2023 in New Mexico as New Mexico residents did. And as many Texans received them in Kansas as Kansans.

Abortion funds, which benefited from “rage giving” in 2022, have helped pay the costs for many abortion-seekers. But some funds have had to cap how much they can give.

The abortion map has been in flux

Since the downfall of Roe, the actions of lawmakers and courts have kept shifting where abortion is legal and under what conditions.

Florida, the nation’s second most-populous state, began enforcing a ban on abortions after the first six weeks of pregnancy on May 1.

That immediately changed the state from one that was a refuge for other Southerners seeking abortion to an exporter of people looking for them.

There were about 30% fewer abortions there in May compared with the average for the first three months of the year. And in June, there were 35% fewer.

While the ban is not unique, the impact is especially large. The average driving time from Florida to a facility in North Carolina where abortion is available for the first 12 weeks of pregnancy is more than nine hours, according to data maintained by Caitlin Myers, a Middlebury College economics professor.

The bans have meant clinics closed or stopped offering abortions in some states.

But some states where abortion remains legal until viability — generally considered to be sometime past 21 weeks of pregnancy, though there’s no fixed time for it — have seen clinics open and expand.

Illinois, Kansas and New Mexico are among the states with new clinics.

There were 799 publicly identifiable abortion providers in the U.S. in May 2022, the month before the Supreme Court reversed Roe vs. Wade. And by this November, it was 792, according to a tally by Myers, who is collecting data on abortion providers.

But Myers says some hospitals that always provided some abortions have begun advertising it. So they’re now in the count of clinics — even though they might provide few of them.

Lack of access to abortions during emergencies is threatening some patients’ lives

How hospitals handle pregnancy complications, especially those that threaten the lives of the women, has emerged as a major issue since Roe was overturned.

President Biden’s administration says hospitals must offer abortions when they’re needed to prevent organ loss, hemorrhage or deadly infections, even in states with bans. Texas is challenging the administration’s policy and the U.S. Supreme Court this year declined to take it up after the Biden administration sued Idaho.

More than 100 pregnant women seeking help in emergency rooms were turned away or left unstable since 2022, the Associated Press found in an analysis of federal hospital investigative records.

Among the complaints were a woman who miscarried in the lobby restroom of Texas emergency room after staff refused to see her and a woman who gave birth in a car after a North Carolina hospital couldn’t offer an ultrasound. The baby later died.

“It is increasingly less safe to be pregnant and seeking emergency care in an emergency department,” Dara Kass, an emergency medicine doctor and former U.S. Health and Human Services official told the AP earlier this year.

Abortion rights are popular with voters

Since Roe was overturned, there have been 18 reproductive rights-related statewide ballot questions.

Abortion rights advocates have prevailed on 14 of them and lost on four.

In the 2024 election, they amended the constitutions in five states to add the right to abortion. Such measures failed in three states: In Florida, where it required 60% support; in Nebraska, which had competing abortion ballot measures; and in South Dakota, where most national abortion rights groups did support the measure.

AP VoteCast data found that more than three-fifths of voters in 2024 supported abortion being legal in all or most cases — a slight uptick from 2020. The support came even as voters supported Republicans to control the White House and both houses of Congress.

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Thousands of women stocked up on abortion pills just in case they needed them, new research shows, with demand peaking in the past couple years at times when it looked like the medications might become harder to get.

Medication abortion accounts for more than half of all abortions in the U.S., and typically involves two drugs: mifepristone and misoprostol. A research letter published Tuesday in JAMA Internal Medicine looked at requests for these pills from people who weren’t pregnant and sought them through Aid Access, a European online telemedicine service that prescribes them for future and immediate use.

Aid Access received about 48,400 requests from across the U.S. for so-called “advance provision” from September 2021 through April 2023. Requests were highest right after news leaked in May 2022 that the Supreme Court would overturn Roe v. Wade — but before the formal announcement that June, researchers found.

Nationally, the average number of daily requests shot up nearly tenfold, from about 25 in the eight months before the leak to 247 after the leak. In states where an abortion ban was inevitable, the average weekly request rate rose nearly ninefold.

“People are looking at looming threats to reproductive health access, looming threats to their reproductive rights, and potentially thinking to themselves: How can I prepare for this? Or how can I get around this or get out ahead of this?” said Dr. Abigail Aiken, an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin and one of the letter’s authors.

Daily requests dropped to 89 nationally after the Supreme Court decision, the research shows, then rose to 172 in April 2023 when there were conflicting legal rulings about the federal approval of mifepristone. The Supreme Court is expected to rule on limits on the drug this year.

Co-author Dr. Rebecca Gomperts of Amsterdam, director of Aid Access, attributed this spike to greater public awareness during times of uncertainty.

Researchers found inequities in who is getting pills in advance. Compared with people requesting pills to manage current abortions, a greater proportion were at least 30 years old, white, had no children and lived in urban areas and regions with less poverty.

Advance provision isn’t yet reaching people who face the greatest barriers to abortion care, said Dr. Daniel Grossman, an OB-GYN at the University of California, San Francisco, who was not involved in the research.

“It’s not surprising that some people would want to have these pills on hand in case they need them, instead of having to travel to another state or try to obtain them through telehealth once pregnant,” he added in an email, also saying more research is needed into the inequities.

Recently, Aiken said, some other organizations have started offering pills in advance.

“It’s a very new idea for a lot of folks because it’s not standard practice within the U.S. health care setting,” she said. “It will actually be news to a lot of people that it’s even something that is offered.”

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