How Texas Women Are Circumventing the State’s New Abortion Law

Mail-order pills and trips out of state are helping Texas women who want to terminate a pregnancy but can’t under the state’s new abortion restrictions. The controversial Texas law bans abortions after fetal cardiac activity can be detected, which means just a few weeks after conception and before many women may know they’re pregnant. Researchers found that in the first month after the law was passed, abortions in Texas were down 49.8 percent from the same month the previous year.

But while the law (SB 8) halved the number of abortions obtained at abortion clinics in Texas, it did not so dramatically curb the number of abortions obtained by Texans. Two new studies suggest the drop in abortions obtained by Texas women has actually been much lower—closer to 10 percent, according to a New York Times analysis. That’s because Texans seeking abortions still found other ways to obtain the procedure after six weeks.

Some visited abortion clinics in neighboring states. Almost 1,400 Texans a month traveled out of state for abortions, according to research from the Texas Policy Evaluation Project at the University of Texas at Austin. The researchers based this figure on patient counts from abortion facilities in Arkansas, Colorado, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico, and Oklahoma.

“These data undercount the total number of Texans receiving care out of state since we did not obtain data from 10 facilities in these states, and it does not include Texans who have traveled to other U.S. states for care since September 2021,” the researchers point out.

Others obtained abortion-inducing drugs by mail. According to a study published in JAMA Network Open, “demand for self-managed abortion through Aid Access increased substantially in Texas” after SB8 took effect. “An initial high increase then leveled off to a more moderate but sustained increase over pre–SB 8 levels.”

For this finding, researchers looked at data from Aid Access, a group that prescribes abortion via telemedicine. “Overall, Aid Access received 1831 requests from Texas for self-managed abortion in September 2021,” the researchers report.

In the first week after the law took effect, requests from Texans spiked from an average of 10.8 per day to 137.7 requests. In the three weeks that followed, “requests decreased from their peak, but remained 245% higher than the pre–SB 8 baseline.”

From October through December 2021, Aid Access received an average of 29.5 requests from Texans per day.

The results of these two studies suggest that some women will continue unwanted pregnancies when abortion is banned, but many others will find ways around the prohibition. And in an era of abortion-inducing drugs and telemedicine, this is likely easier than eve