Self-managed abortions have become more common in the US post-Dobbs, study shows
CNN
Access to abortion facilities has become more restricted since the Supreme Court revoked the federal right to abortion in the United States, and new research suggests that self-managed abortions – often with unsafe and ineffective methods – have increased in the wake of those restrictions.
Access to abortion facilities has become more restricted since the Supreme Court revoked the federal right to abortion in the United States, and new research suggests that self-managed abortions – often with unsafe and ineffective methods – have increased in the wake of those restrictions. The share of women who say they have self-managed an abortion has jumped about 40% since the Dobbs decision, according to a study published Tuesday in the medical journal JAMA Network Open – up from 2.4% at the end of 2021, a few months before court decision, to 3.4% in the summer of 2023, about year after the decision. The findings are based on surveys of more than 14,000 women under the age of 50 who reported on their own experiences, including hundreds of teenagers. Survey data likely underestimates how common self-managed abortion is; the study authors say underreporting is expected when asking about “sensitive, stigmatized, and now, in some settings, criminalized behavior.” It’s unclear, however, whether women may have become less likely to disclose their experiences due to the increased criminalization of pregnancy and abortion or more emboldened to share due to increased public attention on the subject, they wrote. Overall, when accounting for underreporting, the researchers estimate that more than 1 in 10 women will attempt to self-manage an abortion at some point in their life. Self-managed abortions happen outside of the formal health-care system and without the formal supervision of a doctor or nurse. For this research, women were asked whether they had “ever taken or done something on their own, without medical assistance, to try to end a pregnancy.”