Three years after Dobbs, the state of women's health is dire

The true depth of the national crisis is felt in real-life disruptions and degradations, even deaths, that too often go unreported.

It has been exactly three years since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and sent abortion rights back to the states. Amid myriad reflective headlines this week—what the ruling has meant for real people’s lives, for the trajectory of the Court and other established liberty rights, and for our democracy—are numerous reports detailing in stark numbers the nationwide impact of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling.

First, a roundup of some of the latest findings:

• The number of abortions in the United States continues to increase, according to a national report released on Monday by the Society of Family Planning. Telehealth prescriptions for abortion pills rose in 2024 and in-person care declined slightly, though the majority of abortions are still provided at clinics. For abortions obtained via telehealth, around half were facilitated by state shield laws, which provide legal protection to prescribers who send pills to patients in abortion-ban states.

• The number of abortion patients who traveled out of state for care is nearly twice the pre-Dobbs baseline. New data released by the Guttmacher Institute shows that in 2024 the number dropped from the prior year—155,000 patients versus 170,000 in 2023—but still reflects a massive jump from 2020 when 81,000 abortion patients traveled out of state. Illinois is a critical access hub for those in the South and Midwest; Texans were most likely to cross state lines, with more than 28,000 traveling to states as far away as Maryland, Michigan, New York, and Washington for abortions.

• In the year after Dobbs, 42 percent of clinicians who provided abortions in states with near-total or six-week bans relocated to another state, nearly all of them to states that had not imposed a ban. In comparison, just 9% of those who practiced in a state that allowed abortion relocated to another state. These stats are unpacked in this Journal of the American Medical Association article.

• States with the most restrictive abortion laws sustained more than $64 billion in annual economic losses. A new analysis by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research estimates that amount could fund the average health care costs associated with pregnancy, childbirth, and postpartum care for nearly all the 3.6 million births in the United States in 2024. Factoring in states without total- or near-total bans but that enforce other barriers, such as mandatory waiting periods, the toll rises to over $133 billion.

Numbers and sticky stats are only part of the story, of course. The true depth of the national crisis is felt by the myriad real-life disruptions and degradations, even deaths, that too often go unreported. “We knew overturning Roe would have devastating consequences, but three years later, the reality is even more dire,” Fatima Goss-Graves, president of the National Women’s Law Center, said in a statement on the group’s website. “Across the country, people have been denied life-saving care, forced to wait in parking lots while they bleed, air-lifted across state lines for urgent treatment, and criminalized for seeking or providing abortion services. Patients have needlessly suffered infections, trauma, and even death. Doctors have been investigated for doing their jobs. Parents have faced charges for helping their children access care. Surveillance and criminalization has intensified at an alarming rate.”

Confusion and chaos are further hallmarks of this era. On Monday, the Wall Street Journal published an exclusive interview with U.S. Rep. Kat Cammack (R-Fla.), co-chair of the House pro-life caucus. The article details Cammack’s experience of ectopic pregnancy last year and how treatment was delayed on account of doctors’ fear of losing their licenses or facing criminal charges. In an A+ exercise in hypocrisy and gas lighting, she claimed that “fearmongering” about Florida’s abortion law, rather than the law itself, is the problem. She also sought to differentiate her medical needs, stating, “What I went through wasn’t an abortion.”

Nice to be in a position (white, wealthy, politically connected) to cherry pick what crises matter (hers) or predict whose clinical judgment will stand (prosecutor or physician). That said, of course Cammack deserved treatment without fear of repercussions – as does every one of her constituents, patients and doctors alike. But that simply is not the reality in this country right now, whether she or her colleagues in Congress and state legislatures choose to believe it. The tragedy of her particular story is not one of advocates playing politics but rather the placement of politics and politicians in anyone’s decision-making and doctor’s office at all.

Karen Thompson, legal director for Pregnancy Justice, summed up well the state of play today, a whole three years later. “The difference between being pregnant in post-Dobbs America versus pre-Dobbs America is that we are facing backward and returning to the very places we battled for decades to leave. So, on this anniversary, we cannot sit by as the normalization of the erasure of our rights, autonomy, and dignity speeds up. There are no longer sidelines, only the fight.”

Jennifer Weiss-Wolf is executive director of the Birnbaum Women’s Leadership Center at NYU School of Law. She also leads strategy and partnerships at Ms. Magazine.

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