Renata Kiss, FISM News
Roe v. Wade may have been overturned, but the fight for life is hardly over. A recent report revealed that abortion numbers have not decreased since the Dobbs decision.
Pro-abortion research group Society of Family Planning showed in its latest #WeCount report that abortions across the nation have remained consistently high partly as a result of telehealth programs.
According to the study, abortions via telemedicine now make up 16% of all abortions nationwide.
“In July 2023, there were 14,110 telehealth abortions, in August there were 14,060, and in September there were 13,770,” said the report.
Abortion advocate Dr. Ushma Upadhyay at the University of California, San Francisco said, “Telehealth abortion is now a central pillar in the abortion care landscape.”
#WeCount estimated that between July 2023 and September 2023, monthly abortions ranged between 81,000 and 89,000. While these numbers were lower than data from the previous month, they were higher than pre-Dobbs times.
Naturally, the states with total abortion bans were the only ones that experienced a significant drop in cases. These 14 states saw abortions decline by 120,000, with Texas, Georgia, Tennessee, Louisiana, and Alabama at the forefront.
At the same time, the number of women seeking abortions has not changed.
“#WeCount shows that even when a state bans abortion, people continue to need and seek abortion care,” said Alison Norris, MD, PhD, #WeCount Co-Chair and professor at The Ohio State University’s College of Public Health.
Most of those women seek abortions in neighboring Democrat states where the procedures are permitted, causing the abortion rate to spike in those states.
But easy access to telehealth abortion has also raised new concerns regarding the safety of the popular abortion medication, mifepristone. At the end of 2023, the Supreme Court agreed to take up two cases that questioned the Food and Drug Administration’s safety standards concerning the drug.
Since then, major studies on the pill’s potentially harmful effects have been retracted by publishers ahead of the Supreme Court hearing on Feb. 5, per The Daily Wire.
Critics say the retractions were politically motivated to discredit an earlier ruling by U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk that suspended the approval of mifepristone.
Meanwhile, Democrat governors across the nation are now asking the Supreme Court to side with the Food and Drug Administration. They argued that blocking the FDA’s mifepristone production “would have an enormously disruptive impact on state governance and hamstring Governors’ ability to fulfill their mandate of protecting public health and safety in the reproductive healthcare context and beyond,” according to Bloomberg Law.
Conservatives see the issue from a different perspective. Their concern is the safety of the mother and child. Stephen Billy, vice president of state affairs for Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, said that the justices are considering the reinstatement of safety protocols that the Biden administration has removed.
“Biden removing safety protocols was neither medically based nor in line with statutory requirements, and any governor siding with the Biden FDA is choosing politics and ideology over the health and safety of moms and babies in their states,” Billy said.
The Supreme Court will decide the case this summer.