Over 35,000 women fled Texas to get abortions in 2023
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- Tens of thousands of women fled Texas in 2023 to get abortions out of state, data shows.
- It was the most of any state. Nationally, over 171,000 patients traveled out of state to get care.
- The state of reproductive and maternal healthcare will only get worse in Texas, one expert said.
They say everything is bigger in Texas.
That includes the number of women who had to leave the state to get abortion care, new data shows.
In 2023, over 35,000 patients fled Texas to get abortion care in another state, according to data from the Guttmacher Institute, a pro-abortion research and policy organization.
Nationwide, over 170,000 patients traveled out of state for abortion care, according to the data, which Guttmacher collected to analyze the impact of the Supreme Court's Dobbs opinion in 2022, which overturned Roe v. Wade.
Even before Dobbs, Texas already had a strict 6-week ban in place since late 2021.
"Texas had already clamped down on services," Debbie McNabb, a retired gynecologist based in Texas, told Business Insider. "So women had already been traveling a long ways."
McNabb said the state of reproductive affairs will only get worse in Texas, which is ranked No. 2 among states that provide the worst prenatal and maternal health care, according to an analysis of nationwide access to care by Value Penguin, a data analytics firm.
Texas is far from the only problem. A staggering portion of the country has little to no access to maternal health care. Over a third of counties in the United States are maternity care deserts, meaning they have "no hospitals providing obstetric care, no birth centers, no OB/GYN and no certified nurse midwives," according to a report from the March of Dimes, a nonprofit that works to improve the health of mothers and children.
Patients aren't the only ones leaving Texas. Medical students are, too. The majority of them report a desire to choose their residency programs based on where abortion is legal.
"We're going to get fewer trainees, OBGYN trainees in Texas, which is going to increase our maternity deserts and decrease the availability of routine OBGYN care. The other issue is we are not going to get the best and brightest residents," McNabb said, "because people are ranking the states with abortion access higher."