Kansas suppliers carried out a historic variety of abortions in 2023 – and most of them had been carried out on out-of-state residents – in an indication of simply how a lot the 2022 overturning of Roe v Wade has rewritten the map of abortion entry and led ladies to flee their house states for the process.
Greater than 19,000 abortions occurred in Kansas in 2023, a 58% enhance from 2022, in line with a latest report from the Kansas division of well being and setting. Of these, roughly 4,300 abortions had been carried out on Kansas residents, whereas about 15,000 had been achieved on out-of-state residents.
Most of these out-of-state residents had been from Texas, Oklahoma and Missouri – three states that neighbor Kansas and have banned nearly all abortions.
The rise in Kansas abortions mirrors the nationwide upswing within the process. In 2023, the Guttmacher Institute, which tracks abortions and restrictions, recorded greater than 1m US abortions. That’s the very best quantity documented in a decade.
“It actually speaks to a bifurcation of entry,” Isaac Maddow-Zimet, a Guttmacher Institute knowledge scientist, instructed the Guardian late final 12 months.
“On one hand, you will have many states the place abortion has gotten extremely tough to entry – states with complete bans, states with six-week bans. Entry has gotten rather more tough for folks dwelling in these states. After which, however, you will have states with extra protecting legal guidelines the place plenty of the issues that individuals have been doing to ameliorate the results of bans have additionally elevated entry to residents of these states.”
Kansas has lengthy been a nationwide flashpoint within the debate over US abortions. In 1991, hundreds of anti-abortion protesters swarmed the state’s clinics, resulting in greater than 2,600 arrests. In 2009, an anti-abortion activist shot George Tiller, one of many nation’s most well-known abortion suppliers, to demise in Tiller’s Wichita, Kansas, church.
Extra not too long ago, in 2022, Kansas turned the primary state within the nation to carry a post-Roe poll measure on abortion rights. The pink state surprised the nation by voting overwhelmingly in favor of preserving abortion rights. A number of different states, together with the Republican strongholds of Ohio and Montana, have since gone on to go pro-abortion poll measures.
In 2024, nonetheless, Kansas’s Republican-controlled state legislature overrode the Democratic governor Laura Kelly to go a invoice dramatically increasing the federal government’s record-keeping of the abortions carried out in Kansas.
Besides in medical emergencies, abortion suppliers at the moment are required to ask sufferers to call a very powerful issue of their determination to get an abortion in addition to questions on their marital standing, training stage, latest expertise with home violence and whether or not they have acquired monetary help within the final 30 days.
Abortion rights supporters have lengthy warned that such in depth record-keeping can stigmatize the process and doubtlessly endanger the privateness of abortion sufferers. Challenge 2025, a well-known wishlist of conservative coverage proposals, has advised growing the CDC’s nationwide “surveillance” of abortions.
The wishlist urges the CDC to chop funds from states that don’t provide the company with details about “precisely what number of abortions happen inside its borders, at what gestational age of the kid, for what motive, the mom’s state of residence, and by what methodology”.
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