It has been two years this month since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. The decision eliminated the federal right to an abortion and sent the issue back to the states. Since then at least 14 states, including West Virginia, have passed laws prohibiting all abortions, except in very limited circumstances.
However, that does not mean women in those states who want abortions stopped getting them. New figures from the Guttmacher Institute, a leading reproductive rights organization, show tens of thousands of women are traveling to other states to receive abortion procedures or dispensed abortion pills.*
According to the Guttmacher data, 171,000 women traveled out-of-state for abortions in 2023, more than twice the number (73,100) who traveled across state lines to access abortion services in 2019 before Roe was overturned.
The vast majority of West Virginia women seeking abortions in 2023 traveled to four of the five border states. According to Guttmacher, 820 West Virginia women went to Maryland, 600 to Pennsylvania, 590 to Virginia, and 230 to Ohio in 2023. Kentucky, like West Virginia, has a restrictive abortion law.
Clearly, West Virginia’s ban has driven women elsewhere to seek of abortions, but many likely would have traveled anyway. In some instances, abortion clinics in surrounding states were closer than West Virginia’s one clinic in Charleston.
Notably, according to Guttmacher, the number of abortions performed in 2023, the first full year after Roe was overturned, increased by eleven percent over 2020, the last year for which comprehensive estimates are available. “It is also the highest number and rate measured in the United States in over a decade,” according to Guttmacher. The last time over one-million abortions were performed in one year was 2012.**
Predictably, states that permit abortions that border states with bans saw the largest increases in 2023. Abortions increased by 77 percent in neighboring Virginia with women traveling from West Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia and Florida. Illinois saw a 71 percent increase with women traveling from as far away as Texas and Louisiana.
For half a century, abortion opponents fought to overturn Roe, and they were finally successful in 2022. Legislators in many states, including West Virginia, reacted quickly by outlawing abortions. However, the data show those policies did not stop abortions; they just moved them to other states.
*(According to Guttmacher, “63 percent of abortions in U.S. states without total bans were medication abortions in 2023.”)
**(According to Guttmacher, which has been keeping abortion statistics since 1973, the number of abortions performed annually peaked in the early 1990s at over 1.6 million and has been steadily declining over the last three decades.)