A study found that since the Supreme Court’s decision two years ago that women across the country can no longer get abortions, more women are turning to risky ways to end their pregnancies.
Researchers found that the number of women of childbearing age who said they had tried to end their pregnancies on their rose from 2.4% to 3.3% before and after the Supreme Court rejected Roe v. Wade in June 2022.
A study released on Tuesday in the peer-reviewed medical journal JAMA found that women said they did it by eating herbs, drinking alcohol, hitting themselves in the stomach, putting something inside their body, and lifting heavy things.
The study said that some women then had problems that needed medical help, such as pain, blood, and a fever. In other cases, women either had an abortion in a clinic or carried on with their pregnancy.
“Our data show that making abortion harder to get will not mean that people want or need them less often,” Dr. Lauren Ralph, an epidemiologist at the University of California, San Francisco, and co-author of the study, told the Associated Press.
Some people who answered the poll said they had used medicines they got without a prescription. Some used emergency birth control and the abortion pills misoprostol and mifepristone that they got from places other than hospitals.
Mifepristone is an abortion drug that is safe to use. It was questioned in a Supreme Court case earlier this year. Last month, the top court in the country threw out the claim, ending the case for now. Some Republican lawmakers have already said they will bring a new case, though (Axios).
Dr. Grace Ferguson, an OB-GYN in Pittsburgh who wasn’t involved in the study, said, “This study backs up what we’ve been saying for a long time: if you make it hard to get an abortion in a formal setting, people will do it informally.”
Since Dobbs v. Jackson, abortion is illegal in most states, but not all of them. These states are all held by Republicans. This means that a lot of women have been pushed to have pregnancies that could have killed them.
Breanna Cecil, who is 34 years old, told The Independent in the past that she was refused an abortion in Tennessee because she was pregnant, which made it impossible for her to have children in the future.
Early this year, Cecil told The Independent, “The state of Tennessee took my fertility away from me.” “because of these terrible laws they made, they took away my chance to have a family like my own biological family.”
Others have had to go hundreds of miles out of state to get to the closest abortion center.
According to Axios, people who live in some southern counties would have to drive more than 700 miles. A year before Roe v. Wade was overturned, in June 2021, people from only 216 counties had to drive the same distance.
