Reproductive Healthcare 51 Years After Roe: Unreachable Abortion Clinics, Chaos and Countrywide Confusion

((A most disturbing, important, read



Reproductive Healthcare 51 Years After Roe: Unreachable Abortion Clinics, Chaos and Countrywide Confusion
1/22/2024 by Morgan Carmen



Hundreds of pro-abortion demonstrators gather at Lafayette Park for the Annual Women’s March in front of the White House to mark the anniversary of the 1973 passage of Roe v. Wade on January 20, 2024, in Washington, D.C. (Anna Rose Layden / Getty Images)

On May 1, 2022, the day before the Dobbs decision was leaked, the average American was 25 miles from an abortion clinic. Within one year, 23 percent of Americans were farther from the nearest abortion clinic than they were before Roe was overturned. The average person who experienced an increase in distance from the nearest clinic was, as of last year, over 300 miles from the nearest abortion provider. Caitlin Knowles Myers, a professor of economics at Middlebury College who tracks the impact of abortion restrictions on access to brick-and-mortar clinics, brought these statistics to life during “Reproductive Health Care in Post-Roe America,” a panel in August on the ever-shifting reproductive health landscape hosted by the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism. Myers was joined by Dr. Jamila Perritt, an OB-GYN who serves as the CEO of Physicians for Reproductive Health, and Kate Zernike, a national New York Times correspondent who covers, among other things, shifting attitudes on abortion.

The three panelists talked about the post-Dobbs period as one that will feature tens of thousands of forced births purely because of clinic closures—many abortion seekers will be too far away from the ones that remain open. Access is further interrupted, they said, by court decisions so confusing that providers do not know if and when they can legally dispense abortion medication or intervene with abortion care to save lives.
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Dr. Jamila Perritt speaks onstage at the Rally For Abortion Justice on Oct. 2, 2021, in Washington, D.C. (Leigh Vogel / Getty Images for Women’s March)

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Notably, associations like the AMA have not always been supportive of abortion access. “If you look back to the, long before, like the late 19th century, the AMA was actually pushing [for] abortion restrictions,” Zernike said. After all, Perritt added, “Black midwives in the South were controlling this care.” Abortion restrictions allowed “doctors who are almost exclusively white men to be able to corner the share of the market.” The shift in the AMA’s position, Perritt said, was the direct result of physician organizing. “We’ve seen similar changes with the [American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists]. It is not the good nature of people in leadership that causes this to happen—it’s the pressure from grassroots on grass tops that makes this a reality.”

The ground is shifting on a grander scale, said Zernike. Abortion is increasingly understood as healthcare, and the number of people who believe abortion should be illegal in every case is consistently low. “What we’ve seen since Dobbs,” she said, “is that it really motivated Democratic voters and, in fact, Republican voters—anti-abortion voters—are much less likely to vote on this issue. They’re sort of walking away from the issue.” Even so, the danger of losing access to reproductive healthcare is omnipresent, particularly for those already experiencing marginalization. And although most restrictions seem concentrated in red states, Perritt urged everyone “to understand, regardless of whether or not you live in D.C. or you live in New York or you live in California, no place is safe. No state is safe. And we can see very clearly that when one domino falls, the rest [are] not far behind.”

Watch the full webinar here (