Rise in abortions and patients from states such as Texas show how access has shifted since Roe’s overturning. Kansas providers performed a historic number of abortions in 2023 – and most of them were performed on out-of-state residents – in a sign of just how much the 2022 overturning of Roe v Wade has rewritten the map of abortion access and led women to flee their home states for the procedure.
More than 19,000 abortions took place in Kansas in 2023, a 58% increase from 2022, according to a recent report from the Kansas department of health and environment. Of those, roughly 4,300 abortions were performed on Kansas residents, while about 15,000 were done on out-of-state residents.
Most of those out-of-state residents were from Texas, Oklahoma and Missouri – three states that neighbor Kansas and have banned virtually all abortions. The increase in Kansas abortions mirrors the national upswing in the procedure. In 2023, the Guttmacher Institute, which tracks abortions and restrictions, recorded more than 1m US abortions. That’s the highest number documented in a decade.
“It really speaks to a bifurcation of access,” Isaac Maddow-Zimet, a Guttmacher Institute data scientist, told the Guardian late last year. “On one hand, you have many states where abortion has gotten incredibly difficult to access – states with total bans, states with six-week bans. Access has gotten much more difficult for people living in those states. And then, on the other hand, you have states with more protective laws where a lot of the things that people have been doing to ameliorate the effects of bans have also increased access to residents of those states.”.
