If you’re a pregnant person in Texas and you find yourself facing a medical emergency, you are legally able to have an abortion. At least, that’s what the law says.
But the Texas Health and Human Services Commission recorded only 17 legal abortions in the first four months of 2023, according to a new report by the agency. All the procedures were performed “due to medical emergency” and “to preserve [the] health of [the pregnant] woman”.
Experts said it was highly unlikely that, over the course of four months, only 17 people in all of Texas faced emergencies that threatened their pregnancies or their lives, since Texas is home to almost 7 million women between the ages of 15 and 49. Some pregnant people have had to travel for life-saving care; others might be going without care or are getting so sick that they miscarry.
“I was shocked. Considering the population of Texas and reproductive-aged women, this is such a low number,” said Dr Pratima Gupta, a California OB-GYN and a board member of the American College of Obstetricians-Gynecologists.
Since a cascade of state abortion bans took effect following the fall of Roe v Wade last year, doctors across the country have said the vague medical exceptions outlined in the bans are forcing them to delay or even deny care to people in need.
The statistics from the Texas health agency also emphasize how little we know about the reality of post-Roe abortions and pregnancy in the United States. As abortion is pushed into the shadows of US life, information about the procedure and the people who undergo it is becoming harder to come by.
“We know from data around the world that when we have extremely oppressive and repressive governments, we can’t trust vital statistics from those governments,” said Dr Ghazaleh Moayedi, a Texas OB-GYN and board chair-elect of the national group Physicians for Reproductive Health.
To combat this national dearth of information about abortion, the Guttmacher Institute, which tracks abortion restrictions, on Thursday launched a new initiative to quantify the number of abortions performed within the US healthcare system each month. In its first batch of data , the group compared the number of legal abortions performed over a six-month period in 2020 with the number performed in the first six months of 2023. The data does not cover abortions that took place in states with bans.
States that border southern and midwestern states that have banned abortion have seen their numbers surge since 2020, Guttmacher researchers found, probably attributable to the numbers of people who live in places such as Texas and who are fleeing to abortion clinics just beyond their state’s borders.
But rather than relying on reports from state health departments, Guttmacher researchers are asking dozens of US abortion clinics, hospitals and physicians’ offices to provide them with data about the abortions they perform each month. The researchers then use that data, as well as Guttmacher’s vast archives of research, to extrapolate how many abortions are now occurring in each state.
In the past, the Guttmacher Institute has focused on measuring US abortions on a yearly basis, said Isaac Maddow-Zimet, who led the research effort at Guttmacher. But in a post-Roe world, when abortion bans frequently flicker in and out of effect, that takes too long.
North Carolina, for example, enacted a law banning abortion past 12 weeks of pregnancy on 1 July. Now the Guttmacher Institute will be able to capture that ban’s impact starting in October.
“We really built the system so we could capture the impact of these policy changes on folks in a timeframe that could really be useful for policymakers,” Maddow-Zimet said. “A lot of people are traveling from banned states into those border states. That travel comes with pretty significant logistical costs, pretty significant financial costs to folks. Some people are able to bear that cost and some people aren’t.”
But there are limits to the Guttmacher Institute data, too. The research focuses on abortions that occur within the formal US healthcare system – not at-home abortions, which appear to be growing only more popular since Roe’s fall. (Medical experts widely agree that someone can safely self-manage an abortion using pills early on in pregnancy.)
“We know broadly that that’s something that definitely is happening,” Maddow-Zimet said. “I think that nobody has a precise estimate of the number.”
English (US)