Blitz Bureau
WASHINGTON: Abortion in the US has become slightly more common despite bans or deep restrictions in most Republican-controlled states, and the legal and political fights over its future are not over yet, according to an AP report.
It’s now been two and a half years since the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. 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 v. Jackson Women’s Health Organisation.
Overturning Roe and enforcing abortion bans has changed how woman obtain abortions in the US. But one thing it hasn’t done is put a dent in the number of abortions being obtained, said the AP report.
There have been slightly more monthly abortions 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 the University of California 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. 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 centre 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’.
