Across State Lines: Six Months Post-Dobbs

Understanding the state of abortion in the U.S., and the states it’s affecting.

Six months after the Dobbs v. Jackson decision overturned Roe v. Wade, more and more states are banning abortion. Full abortion bans now exist in 13 states: Idaho, South Dakota, Wisconsin, West Virginia, Kentucky, Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Alabama, according to the New York Times. Abortion accessibility has changed drastically for millions of people over these past six months, and not for the better.

Some states have total abortion bans, with no exceptions for the life of the mother, rape, or incest written into the law. These exceptions, existing in Idaho, Mississippi, and West Virginia, don’t do quite as much as people think. “Exceptions do mean something for people who are dying of pregnancy related complications, but in terms of exceptions for sexual assault or incest, I’m gonna steal a quote from someone else, ‘justice moves a lot slower than gestation,’ so it doesn’t really matter. It’s really difficult to get a waiver to receive an abortion in time,” says Holly Calvasina, a Development Director at CHOICES Center for Reproductive Health in Carbondale, Illinois and Memphis, Tennessee.

People now have to travel significantly longer distances to gain access to a safe and legal abortion. Abortions have always been difficult to access, especially for those who live in rural areas, are low income, and don’t have access to a car, but the further banning of abortions has exacerbated this issue. Funds that were already in place to assist with travel before the Dobbs decision have been expanded. Calvasina explains that they “work really closely with ARCSoutheast, which is Access Reproductive Care Southeast, and MAC, which is the Midwest Access Coalition, and they coordinate practical support for our patients. On our side, we have an internal patient discount fund, which if you can’t afford the cost of your care for any reason we’ll cover it. We work together with abortion funds to make sure that we’ll do everything we can so that people who need abortions can get them.”

Abortion is illegal in Tennessee, without any exceptions, so everyone who would have gone to the CHOICES location in Memphis will now have to make the three hour drive to their Carbondale clinic. Not only is getting to a clinic a hoop to jump through, there are many other obstacles facing people who need an abortion. “In many states you’d have to know that you’re pregnant very early, which is a tough thing. And in many states there are laws about having to have parental permission and things like that. It’s super logistically complicated and expensive, and you have to mobilize all of your resources,” said Nora Katz, a former patient escort at Jackson Women’s Health Organization (the clinic in the Dobbs case).

An alternative to traveling long distances is having the abortion pill shipped directly to individuals after getting a prescription, although some are finding ways to access the pill without one. The pill, however, comes with its own complexities and stipulations. While medication abortions are a great option, they only work up until a certain gestational age: 11 weeks, according to Planned Parenthood. If a person does not know they are pregnant or they are unable to access the pill until after this time, a medication abortion is no longer a viable option. They are relatively easy to access: there are many online resources including planc.org that will mail the pill to individuals, but contradictory federal and state laws make having a medication abortion a legal gray area for many people living in states with strict bans, so that is a personal risk they have to be willing to take. Additionally, the pill cannot be used in certain situations. Katz points out that “there are circumstances here in Mississippi where if you are having a miscarriage, a doctor isn’t going to do what they need to do to help you in that situation because it is technically an abortion. So the pill is super important, but it can’t be the only thing.”

(Photo reprinted from ABC News)

Jackson Women’s Health Organization in Jackson, Mississippi before its closure post-Dobbs.

A major issue with the massive influx of people traveling to out of state clinics, as well as the increased amount of babies that will be born each year, is that many facilities do not have the resources and capacity to properly handle the overwhelming need for care. “There’s an estimate that every year there will be 5,000 more babies than there would’ve been, which the state [Mississippi] is not equipped to handle. One of the only maternity wards in the Mississippi Delta, one of the poorest parts of our state, has recently closed. So you can’t get an abortion and then you can’t get adequate care to be pregnant,” Katz said. The lack of resources to care for a child after its birth is a major issue, and that is only exacerbated by the extra babies that will be born next year. Traveling poses these same challenges. “At a certain point, even in the quote unquote ‘safe states’ there isn’t going to be the capacity to provide the number of abortions that are gonna be needed. So even if someone could get on a plane, no one knows when you could get an appointment,” Katz said.

It is undeniable that the Dobbs decision has forced abortion into the forefront of the news and people’s minds. After seeing the effects of mass amounts of abortion bans, some people who may have once been apathetic toward the issue are acknowledging it more and more. “I think the Dobbs decision has forced a lot of people to challenge their involvement with the movement, and I’ve seen more overwhelming support for abortion access in our area than I thought we would,” Calvasina said. This recent media coverage has increased awareness of both how commonplace the need for these services has become, and what their opinions on the matter might be.

With the grim state that abortion access is in, it’s tough to know exactly what will happen next, but there is not an overwhelming amount of optimism regarding the future. “I think we’re going to lose it in more and more states, and I think there will be a point where the closest abortion clinic to Mississippi will be in Illinois. I think it gets a lot worse before it gets better,” Katz said. It is incredibly hard to change the laws that these states have put in place, even if some of the local population are in support. “It is going to be really difficult to see movement regardless of popular opinion because most red states are heavily gerrymandered and we’re kind of fighting for our lives down here…We’re looking at what’s the worst that can come next? Not necessarily, what’s the good option?” Calvasina said.

Calvasina has a message for those who live in states where abortion is still allowed: “We need our allies in blue states to continue to show up for us. We need people in blue states to continue to make philanthropic investment in progressive work including reproductive health rights and justice in the south, and what I call the honorary south like Ohio and Indiana. You guys cannot abandon us because we will get through this together, but if you leave us behind, you’re leaving behind a lot of people who didn’t vote for these policies.”