The end of Roe v. Wade in 2022 was supposed to be devastating for abortion access across the US. Thousands of women every month—the ones who could afford it—would be forced to travel long distances to receive care. Many more women would be forced to continue pregnancies they didn’t want and couldn’t afford. The crisis would be worst in the South, the thinking went, because right-wing lawmakers were competing to see who could pass the most draconian bans.
Then something astonishing happened: In the four years after Roe’s demise, the number of abortions rose by almost 20 percent.
It’s one of the paradoxes of the Dobbs era: While abortion rights have been drastically curtailed in much of the country, abortion access has exploded. Galvanized by the extremism of the Supreme Court’s decision, reproductive health advocates have built an entire healthcare, legal, and financing infrastructure that has made abortions possible for hundreds of thousands of women in some of the most conservative parts of the US.
In this package, we look at the surprising resilience of the abortion access movement—and at how abortion opponents, including Students for Life’s Kristan Hawkins, are doubling down on their hardline agenda. At the center of the post-Dobbs story is the growing availability of abortion pills, which now account for almost two-thirds of all abortions in the US. “Medication abortion is here to stay,” one leading telehealth provider says. “You can’t put this genie back in a bottle.”
