More women in the US are seeking abortion care through telehealth than before the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade, according to a new report.
One in five clinician-provided abortions performed in the first quarter of 2024 were obtained through telehealth services, the analysis from abortion advocacy group the Society of Family Planning showed. That contrasts with the second quarter of 2022, during which only one in 20 abortions were obtained through telehealth.
That increase comes in the aftermath of the Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization in June 2022, which rolled back federal abortion access protections. Currently, 14 states have enacted total or near-total bans against the procedure. Though bans can serve as impediments to people seeking care, it doesn’t necessarily stop them: There were an average of 99,000 abortions performed across the US during each of the first three months of 2024, an increase compared with an average of around 82,270 procedures per month in the second quarter of 2022.
Telehealth services can help patients navigate care despite barriers like distance and cost, said Ushma Upadhyay, a public health social scientist at the University of California, San Francisco, who participated in the research.
“What we’re seeing is the impact of innovation in telehealth,” she said. “Providers are really doing whatever they can, understanding the tremendous barriers that people face, particularly in states with bans.”
There were at least 208,000 fewer abortions provided at brick-and-mortar clinics between the second quarter of 2022 and the first quarter of 2024, the Society of Family Planning report estimated. Researchers attributed those losses to the states with total- and six-week abortion bans. The report also doesn’t account for any increase in abortions obtained through extrajudicial means, such as overseas telehealth clinics.
Researchers also noted the general increase of telehealth services across health care after Covid.
“It just made sense that abortion via telehealth was also a service,” said Upadhyay.
This article was generated from an automated news agency feed without modifications to text.
