(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . US abortions actually increased after Dobbs, which means forced-birthers are just getting started [1] [] Date: 2023-11-29 If you need more evidence that Republicans will try to enact forced-birth laws nationwide if they ever retake the White House and Congress, you need look no further than their meager return on investment from the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision. In fact, since conservatives succeeded in vaporizing Roe v. Wade, abortions have actually gone up nationwide. It’s not a huge increase—around 0.2%—but you can rest assured MAGA Mike Johnson has noted it and wondered what ever happened to his glorious cornucopian-uteri utopia. In a new episode of The New York Times’ “The Daily,” Margot Sanger-Katz, a contributor to The Times’ The Upshot column, discusses the counterintuitive results of the Dobbs decision, which ended Roe and threw the abortion question back to the states. The gist? Abortions have indeed gone down in states that prohibit abortions, but they’ve gone up enough in abortion-legal states to make up for those decreases. “The estimate is that the number of abortions since the Supreme Court decision only went up by like 0.2%, but when you consider that there are all these states that banned abortion totally, where abortions went to zero, what it’s really telling us is that the states where abortion stayed legal increased by so much that they were able to sort of counterweight that reduction,” said Sanger-Katz. “And I think there are a couple of factors that really explain what’s going on here.” RELATED STORY: Some Republicans were willing to compromise on abortion bans. Activists made sure they didn't Of course, while forced-birthers no doubt hoped and expected that ending Roe would put a big dent in the number of abortions performed nationwide, they did win some significant battles—if not the war. What they actually appear to have accomplished, though, is to restrict the choices of pregnant people who might otherwise have sought abortion services while boosting the number of abortions performed in legal states. In an Upshot column she wrote a week before her appearance on The Daily, Sanger-Katz cited research from the Institute of Labor Economics that showed a significant post-Dobbs increase in births among women in restrictive states. [The researchers] found that births increased 2.3 percent, on average, in states with bans relative to states where abortion remained legal. The analysis showed that the increased births were disproportionately among women in their 20s and Black and Hispanic women, which researchers said could be because these groups tend to be poorer, making it harder to travel. They are also the demographic groups that have tended to be more likely to seek abortions. Dr. Alison Norris, who studies reproductive health at Ohio State and was not involved in the study, said she was not surprised to see births increasing, particularly among those groups. She noted that before Dobbs, abortion access was already limited in many states, so “any measure of change that we see will in some ways be an underestimate of the challenges that people experience.” Of course, it was easy to predict that our nation’s current patchwork of competing abortion laws would lead to unequal outcomes among women in different income brackets, but what’s a little surprising is the failure of new legal restrictions to make any dent in the number of abortions performed nationwide. But a closer look does yield some likely answers. Most obviously, says Sanger-Katz, a lot of women who live in restrictive states are traveling to neighboring states where abortion access is protected, and “there’s been a big growth in abortion infrastructure to accommodate those women, and they are traveling there and they are getting abortions.” But that’s not the entire story—and here’s where messaging about the importance of electing Democrats in order to preserve women’s right to comprehensive reproductive health care comes into play. Because it turns out that having a Democrat in the White House when Roe was overturned made a huge difference to women who still wanted a choice. “Right around the same time that the Supreme Court overturned the Roe decision, the Biden administration changed the rules for how women can get abortion pills in the United States,” Sanger-Katz told “The Daily.” “So the abortion pill has been legal for 20 years, but for most of that time, if you wanted to take abortion pills, you had to go to a physical clinic, meet with a doctor in person, and then they would give you the pill in person and you would take the first pill at the visit and then take additional medicine home with you. … What the new rules allow is that you can get abortion through telemedicine. And with these telemedicine abortions women could talk to a doctor from their home and then have abortion pills mailed to their home and then they could take the abortion pills at home, and that change made abortion less expensive in a lot of cases, and it also made it much more convenient for women who didn’t live near an abortion clinic.” Meanwhile, states that preserved abortion rights have gone out of their way to protect and expand access. “We’ve also seen a lot of these states that always had legal abortions have started pursuing new policies to make abortion even easier to get and less expensive. States have required insurance companies to cover abortion. They’ve provided extra legal protections for doctors that provide abortions. They’ve allowed nurse practitioners and other kinds of people to provide abortions in their states, and I think all of that is sort of a political reaction to the Supreme Court decision, and those changes might not have happened in the absence of it. And all of those changes probably also helped make abortion a little bit more available to women in those states, and also probably raised their awareness that abortion was an option for them.” RELATED STORY: Nebraska activists launch effort to put abortion rights on the ballot next year So what does this mean going forward? If you think Republicans will be content to sit back and let women in blue states make their own choices, you haven’t been paying attention. As Daily Kos’ Joan McCarter recently noted, a national abortion ban is definitely on the ballot in 2024. Influential conservatives are already plotting to use the 1873 Comstock Act to prevent women from obtaining abortion pills through the mail—all they need is a Republican president to do their bidding. And facing a counterintuitive uptick in abortions post-Roe, forced-birthers will no doubt be looking to double down. “I think [Dobbs] has backfired,” said Sanger-Katz. “You think about the activists that brought this case to the Supreme Court, their goal is not just to reduce abortions in Texas and Mississippi, they really wanted to reduce abortions across the entire country, and I think we’ve all been really focused on the states that were banning abortion, but there was also this huge change in the states that didn’t ban abortion, which is a lot of states. And I think that’s why we see abortions going up by so much.” Meanwhile, the law of unintended consequences still holds plenty of sway. “I don’t know that the anti-abortion activists could have ever predicted that this would be the effect of the end of Roe,” said Sanger-Katz, “and I don’t even think that the abortion rights activists saw this coming. I think everyone assumed that the end of Roe was going to mean a decrease in abortion, not an increase.” RELATED STORY: A national abortion ban is definitely on the 2024 ballot Check out Aldous J. Pennyfarthing’s four-volume Trump-trashing compendium, including the finale, Goodbye, Asshat: 101 Farewell Letters to Donald Trump, at this link. Or, if you prefer a test drive, you can download the epilogue to Goodbye, Asshat for the low, low price of FREE. [END] --- [1] Url: https://dailykos.com/stories/2023/11/29/2208666/-US-abortions-actually-increased-after-Dobbs-which-means-forced-birthers-are-just-getting-started?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=top_news_slot_3&pm_medium=web Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/