In a few weeks, Florida and Arizona are expected to join most southern states in the United States in banning abortion. This is a significant shake-up in the abortion legal landscape, and the data is shared exclusively with NPR Maps and quantifies what the changes will mean for millions of Americans.
On Tuesday, the Arizona Supreme Court cleared the way to enforce an 1864 law. That law completely bans abortion except when a person’s life is in danger. Last week, the Florida Supreme Court issued its decision allowing the ban on abortion after six weeks of gestation to take effect on May 1.
Caitlin Myers, an economics professor at Middlebury College in Vermont, has been tracking abortion centers and travel distances since 2009. She analyzed the impact of these latest decisions on the access card.
“As a result of these bans, approximately 6 million women of childbearing age are experiencing an increase in distance of more than 200 miles,” she says.
She points out that Floridians seeking an abortion after six weeks will have to travel nearly 600 miles to North Carolina, which has a 72-hour waiting period. “So we’re talking about a day’s drive to a state that requires you to commit to this multi-day process,” Myers says. “A lot of people might end up traveling several hundred miles further to Virginia.”
For Arizonans, after the 1864 law took effect, “their nearest destinations are quite long drives. They’re going to have to travel hundreds of miles to reach southern California, New Mexico and Colorado,” says Myers. “I think the fallout in Arizona will probably affect California in a way that California hasn’t yet been affected by bans.”
Myers runs the Myers Abortion Facility database. She gathered data on facilities — including clinics, doctors and hospitals that publicly indicated they performed abortions — going back more than a decade, using licensing databases , directories and Wayback Machine captures of websites from years past. She uses a team of undergraduate research assistants to periodically call institutions and make sure the information is up to date.
Number of abortions rises in Florida, falls in Arizona
Although Florida and Arizona have historically been politically purple states and have both banned abortion for 15 weeks since 2022, the states have followed different trajectories on abortion and play very different roles in their regions.
There were about 12,000 abortions in Arizona in 2023, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization that supports abortion rights. Out-of-state travel accounted for 3 percent of abortions in the state, and the overall number of abortions there has declined in recent years, Guttmacher notes.
By contrast, there were nearly 85,000 abortions in Florida in 2023, according to state data, a few thousand fewer than Illinois, which has positioned itself as a safe haven for people seeking abortions in post-war.Roe deer time. And the number of abortions performed in the state is increasing. “The majority of the increase is due to out-of-state travel to Florida due to bans in neighboring states,” says Isaac Maddow-Zimet, data scientist at Guttmacher. “It really speaks to the role that Florida has played in the region where there aren’t really a lot of other options.”
The Alliance Defending Freedom, which brought the case in Arizona, presents those affected by the new laws in a different light. “We celebrate the Arizona Supreme Court’s decision that allows the state’s pro-life law to once again protect the lives of countless innocent unborn children,” the organization wrote in a statement this week .
Even with new bans in place, there are several ways that Florida and Arizona residents will be able to access abortion without traveling hundreds of miles. People with means will be able to travel to states where access to abortion is protected. Others will be able to use telehealth to connect with providers in those states and receive abortion medications through the mail — a practice that has gained popularity in recent months. Telehealth medical abortions, however, could be curtailed by a pending U.S. Supreme Court case. (A decision in this case is expected this summer.)
In Florida, some will be able to abort before the limit of six weeks of gestation, or approximately two weeks after a missed period. “People have a very narrow window to meet this gestational length limit, even if they know about their pregnancy in time,” says Maddow-Zimet of Guttmacher. “And that’s something that’s particularly difficult in Florida, because Florida requires an in-person counseling visit 24 hours before the abortion.”
“A significant obstacle”
Thousands of people in Florida and Arizona won’t be able to navigate these options and will carry their pregnancies instead, Myers says.
“It’s easy to think: If abortion is so important to someone, they’ll find a way, they’ll figure it out,” she says, but research on people seeking abortion illustrates why that’s not always possible. “(Many) have low incomes. They live in very difficult life circumstances. They experience disruptive events like losing a job, breaking up with a partner or the threat of eviction. Many of them are parents and have difficulty getting a child. care.” A large study showed that about 80% of people seeking abortions had subprime credit scores.
“If you think about all this, it is perhaps not so surprising that the results of my research and those of others show very clearly and unequivocally that distance poses a significant barrier for people who are looking for an abortion,” Myers says.
Mary Ziegler, a law professor and historian of reproductive rights at the University of California, Davis, says it’s worth noting how these two states came to impose new bans. “The common denominator is that conservative state supreme courts are making decisions contrary to what voters would want, interestingly, in an election year where these justices are facing retention elections,” she says .
Florida voters will have the opportunity to weigh in on abortion access in November, when an amendment to their state’s constitution goes on the ballot. An effort to place an abortion amendment on the ballot in Arizona is also underway. Opponents of abortion rights in both states have vowed to fight the measures.
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