Given that so many people are turning to abortion pills, it should come as no surprise that the anti-abortion movement has ramped up its efforts to restrict access to the medication since the overturn of Roe. The US Supreme Court will be hearing a case next week that could lead to even more restrictions on mifepristone, a drug that has been FDA-approved since 2000.
Still, despite these legal threats and the looming possibility of a future Trump administration using the executive branch to further crack down on the pills, thus far advocates for abortion rights have made tremendous gains in expanding access to the medication since Roe's overturn.
As I've previously reported for Vox, it's never been easier, faster, and cheaper to access abortion medication nationwide, even in red states with total abortion bans.
Some of this is driven by the growth of new shield laws, where blue-state abortion providers can now mail pills to people living in states where abortion is illegal. Some of it is thanks to the growth of e-commerce sites and other international providers, which have collectively and significantly brought down the cost for patients.
Even if the US Supreme Court bans mifepristone this summer or places new restrictions on the drug, many of these alternative methods would remain intact, and many abortion providers would switch to providing misoprostol-only regimens.
In other words, the anti-abortion movement is going to have a really hard time stopping people from ending pregnancies they don't want.
But okay, here's what we still don't know when it comes to figuring out why abortion incidence is going up.
The big remaining unknown is whether the increase we've seen has been driven in part by people's shifting childbearing decisions. Do fewer people want to have kids now? Do more people want to delay having kids? Researchers aren't sure.
Maddow-Zimet tells me this is a particularly difficult thing to measure, and there's been almost no quality data on changes in people's intention to have children since Roe's overturn. (Though we might get some soon with next year's National Survey of Family Growth.)
An even bigger unknown: How many people wanted to end a pregnancy since Dobbs but weren't able to? That sort of data is critical to know but has always been extremely difficult to collect, and we still don't have reliable methods to do so.
Given all these unknowns, not to mention uncertainty with the upcoming presidential election and future funding streams, it's hard to say how and whether these abortion trends will continue. We'll be keeping a close watch.
—Rachel Cohen, senior reporter
