Women can no longer get a legal abortion in two states.
Although Roe v. Wade remains the law of the land, women can no longer get a legal abortion in two states, Oklahoma and South Dakota. In at least one other, Missouri, the only clinic is booked and not accepting new appointments. And in a fourth state, Wisconsin, clinics will not schedule abortions for after the end of the Supreme Court’s term in late June. Before May 2, when a draft Supreme Court opinion that would overturn Roe was leaked, there had been at least one abortion clinic in every state. But in some states, health care providers aren’t waiting for the actual decision to be issued to start operating as if Roe were overturned.
“It’s already happening,” said Caitlin Myers, a professor of economics at Middlebury College who studies abortion accessibility. She is leading a national survey of abortion clinics and supplied data on her recent findings, which was verified by The New York Times. The changes in the last few weeks suggest how quickly an overturning of Roe could reduce abortion access across the South and Midwest, which would be a hard-fought victory for the anti-abortion movement. A survey published Wednesday by the Guttmacher Institute found that abortions had increased around the country between 2017 and 2020, reversing decades of declines. Around one in five pregnancies ended in abortion during that period. Roe guarantees a constitutional right to abortion until the point of fetal viability, around 23 weeks, and without it, around half of states are expected to ban the procedure. Many of those states already had limited access — six had a single clinic, and three had two — and various restrictions that made abortions harder to get. Now it is changing from hard to impossible, at least without crossing state lines. In Oklahoma, clinics have stopped operating because the state passed a new ban, even though it clearly conflicts with Roe. “We haven’t had abortion for two and a half weeks,” said Susan Braselton, a clinic escort and a board member of the Roe Fund in Oklahoma, which helps patients finance abortions. Ms. Braselton said she had expected intervention from the courts to stop the law from being enforced: “I would never have thought this would happen.”
Jim Olsen, a Republican state representative in Oklahoma who has been a leader on adding several abortion restrictions in the state, said, “This is something that people have worked on and prayed for for 50 years, so it’s a tremendous victory.
