Requests for By-Mail Abortion Pills Are Up Almost 300% Since Roe Was Overturned

The study found that Aid Access, a telemedicine organization that mails abortion pills across the U.S., was initially receiving an average of 82 requests per day from those 30 states during a certain baseline period prior to May 2022.

A new study released today in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that the number of Americans seeking self-managed abortion medication across 30 states has nearly tripled in the month since the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision.

The study found that Aid Access, a telemedicine organization that mails abortion pills across the U.S., was initially receiving an average of 82 requests per day from those 30 states during a certain baseline period prior to May 2022.

However, after an unfinished draft of the Supreme Court’s majority decision to overturn Roe leaked to Politico in May, that number rose to an average of 137 daily requests. After the ruling became official in late June, the daily number of requests for self-managed abortion care spiked to 214 on average.

Since June, at least 13 states in the U.S. have instituted anti-abortion laws that either severely restrict the procedure or ban it entirely. The study found that, in states with complete bans, the number of individuals citing “current abortion restrictions” as their reason for contacting Aid Access doubled after the Dobbs decision, from approx 31% to roughly 62%.

The 5 states from which the most requests for abortion medication originated were Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, Alabama, and Oklahoma.

According to FiveThirtyEight, the 2 months following the Dobbs decision saw 10,670 fewer legal abortions performed in the U.S. than was estimated prior to the overturning of Roe.

Many reproductive health advocates predict that by-mail abortion pills are likely to become the next battleground in the larger fight over abortion rights. This summer, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland warned conservative states that they couldn’t ban FDA-approved abortion pills, which are designed to be taken in the first 10 weeks of pregnancy.