The Foundation to Abolish Abortion (FAA) released research on Monday demonstrating a momentous rise in self-managed abortions in pro-life states which were widely reported to have banned abortion following the overturn of Roe v. Wade in June 2022.
Self-managed abortion is "[a]n abortion performed by a pregnant woman without assistance or oversight from the formal healthcare system of clinics and doctors. Typically this means a woman ordering abortion pills online and using them at home." These abortions are protected by law in every state because pro-life laws exempt mothers from prosecution. A recent analysis of laws in 27 pro-life states found that mothers cannot be prosecuted for abortion in any of them. The result is that self-managed abortion is legal in all 50 states.
The new research from FAA relies on data published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) which observed abortion pill requests to Aid Access, the leading abortion pill vendor. The data shows that abortion pill requests roughly tripled to 880 per week in the 12 pro-life states that originally "banned" abortion following Dobbs in the period of time between the leak of the Dobbs decision and the weeks immediately following the pro-life "bans" going into effect.
The FAA research then cites statistics published by the New York Times which show that Aid Access accounts for 46 percent of all online abortion pill orders, and data from University of Texas researcher Abigail Aiken which found that 88 percent of women who order abortion pills online go through with the abortion. With these statistics in mind, FAA estimates the total number of self-managed abortions in the 12 pro-life states in the 12 months following the Dobbs decision was 50,768.
But the data doesn't stop there. In a press release published roughly one year after the Dobbs decision, Aid Access reported they had sent 3,500 abortion pill orders into states that had banned in-clinic abortions. Extrapolating from there, FAA estimates that 93,996 self-managed abortions are now happening per 12 months in the (now) 14 states that have banned in-clinic abortions.
The report concludes:
Self-managed abortion in states with 'bans' is a growing problem, increasingly blunting any effect the “bans” may have had in curbing the supply of abortion in these states. These numbers confirm that, because no states’ laws are considered to prohibit self-managed abortion, babies in all 50 states remain essentially unprotected from abortion."
There is no solution to this problem other than criminalizing abortion for everyone involved. The pro-life dogma that mothers must never be prosecuted for murdering their preborn children must be rejected if justice is to be established and if anything substantive is to be done to save preborn children being led to slaughter.
