A study looks at the rate of self-managed abortion since Roe v. Wade fell. The study found that the use of mifepristone to self-manage abortion has nearly doubled from 6.6% in 2021 to 11.0% in 2023.
ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
Access to legal abortion has plummeted in the U.S. since the Supreme Court eliminated federal abortion rights. A new study finds that more and more women are trying to end pregnancies on their own without medical assistance. Sarah Varney with our partner KFF Health News reports.
SARAH VARNEY, BYLINE: Tia Freeman is a reproductive health organizer. She leads trainings for Tennesseans on how to safely take medication abortion pills outside of medical settings. Abortion is almost entirely illegal in Tennessee. Freeman, who lives near Nashville, says people have all sorts of reasons for wanting to stop a pregnancy on their own – the cost of traveling to another state, finding child care and losing daily wages.
TIA FREEMAN: Some people – it’s that they don’t have support networks in their families, where they would need to have someone drive them to a clinic and then sit with them, and maybe their family is super conservative. They don’t have anyone to do that. They would rather just get the pills in in their home and be able to do it by themselves.
VARNEY: Medication abortion can be bought online. The new study from researchers at the University of California, San Francisco found that the percentage of survey respondents who used abortion pills outside of the formal health care system was 11% in 2023, up from 6.6% before the U.S. ended federal abortion rights. The study was published Tuesday in the online journal JAMA Network.
One of the most common reasons for self-managed abortion was a concern about privacy. But co-author Lauren Ralph says the overturning of Roe v. Wade is weighing heavily on people’s minds.
LAUREN RALPH: We found that 6% of people said that the reason that they self managed was because abortion was illegal where they lived.
VARNEY: Kristi Hamrick is with Students for Life Action, a national anti-abortion group. She doesn’t believe the study’s findings, and she says they benefit people who provide abortion pills. In an emailed statement, she said, quote, “it should surprise no one that the abortion lobby reports their business is doing well without problems.”
In the JAMA study, women said they tried some dangerous methods to end their pregnancy, including drugs and alcohol and hitting themselves in the stomach. The term self-managed abortions conjures up the image of back-alley procedures in the 1950s and 60s. But in the latest survey, one of the most common methods was abortion pills. Dr. Laura Laursen, an OB-GYN in Chicago, says self-managed abortions using medication abortion are far safer either inside or outside the healthcare system.
LAURA LAURSEN: They’re equally safe no matter which way you do it. So it involves, you know, passing the pregnancy and bleeding, which is what happens when you have a miscarriage. If your body doesn’t pass a miscarriage on its own, these are actually the medication that we give women to pass the miscarriage.
VARNEY: Since the Supreme Court eliminated federal abortion rights, 25 states have banned or further restricted abortion.
SHAPIRO: That’s Sarah Varney with our partner, KFF Health News.
(SOUNDBITE OF AKON SONG, “CRACK ROCK”)
Copyright © 2024 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
