Opinion: Enforcing abortion bans is much harder than passing them
When Texas imposed strict limits on abortion last fall, the number of abortions performed by clinics in that state fell by half. But the actual decline in abortions was much smaller because many women traveled to clinics in other states or used readily available drugs to end their pregnancies at home.
The Texas law prohibits abortion after fetal cardiac activity can be detected, which typically happens about six weeks into a pregnancy. During the first month after the law took effect at the beginning of September, the Texas Policy Evaluation Project reported, Texas clinics performed 50% fewer abortions than they did during the same month in 2020.
That’s an average of about 1,400 out-of-state abortions per month, which represents nearly two-thirds of the drop in reported Texas abortions. And that cross-border tally is surely an undercount because it is limited to 34 clinics in seven states. That number fell sharply after the first week but remained far above the baseline, averaging 37 for the rest of September and 30 in October, November and December. Overall, Aid Access received more than 4,500 requests from Texas between Sept. 1 and the end of the year, or about 1,100 a month.