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How Much Farther Do Rural Women Have to Travel for an Abortion? [1]
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Date: 2024-10-29
Rural women have always had to travel farther than their metropolitan counterparts to receive an abortion, but a Daily Yonder analysis of new data shows the distance increased in the years following the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, which dismantled the federal right to an abortion.
Abortion rights are on the ballot in several states this election year. Previous reporting shows that expanded access will decrease the distance to a clinic for both rural and urban women in states like Missouri, where a constitutional amendment seeks to create a right to abortion until fetal viability.
Under current circumstances, however, the average rural woman has to travel an estimated 159 miles to receive an abortion, up from 103 miles in 2021, before Roe v. Wade was overturned.
But travel distance varies by state, with women in parts of rural South Texas having to travel up to almost 800 miles to receive care.
Restrictions on abortion rights also increased travel distances for urban and suburban women. Women who live in metropolitan counties have to drive an estimated 103 miles, on average, to receive an abortion, an increase of 61 miles since the 2022 Dobbs decision.
The analysis is based on data provided by the Myers Abortion Facility Database, last updated September 4, 2024.
(This analysis only considers the location of the nearest abortion clinic in a state where abortion is not banned. It does not account for other restrictions, such as limits on the stage of pregnancy at which termination is allowed.)
Several States Ban Abortions, Others Expand Access
Trigger laws in thirteen states outright banned or severely restricted abortion access in the days and weeks following the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade in June of 2022.
In other states, circumstances didn’t change for the worse overnight. Louisiana’s trigger law was blocked until the end of July, 2022, when state legislators enforced the ban over a month after the initial Dobbs decision.
By September of 2022, three months after Dobbs, abortion had been banned in 15 states.
Other states like California actually expanded access to abortion in the months following the Dobbs decision. But those improvements weren’t enough to offset the long distances rural women have to travel to receive care nationwide.
Abortion Access Varies by Region
Abortion access for rural women varies regionally, and not all of that variation is because of bans and restrictions.
There are no abortion restrictions in Alaska, for instance. But the average rural Alaskan woman has to travel about 262 miles to the nearest abortion clinic, the fifth longest distance to a clinic behind Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi, and Arkansas, in that order.
Alaska is the largest state in the country by land area, with a population spread out among some of the most remote corners of the nation. Access is therefore more a function of the physical geography than the legal landscape.
But in the rural South, where the average distance to a clinic increased from 100 miles in 2021 to about 242 miles in 2024, this lengthy distance is, in fact, a reflection of the nation’s decimated abortion rights.
In Louisiana, where all the bordering states have also issued abortion bans, the distance to a clinic increased by almost 400 miles for rural women since the Dobbs decision. The average rural Louisianan is about 492 miles away from the nearest abortion clinic.
Rural women in the southern part of the state have to travel distances of up to 585 miles, meanwhile.
But states like Oregon, California, and Washington, improved constitutional rights to reproductive care after the Dobbs decision. In Oregon, the average rural distance to an abortion clinic decreased by about 18 miles, for example.
In California and Washington, the distance to a clinic remained virtually unchanged. Although California did expand rights to contraception under the state’s constitution with the passing of Proposition 1 in 2022.
What’s on the Ballot This Year?
Measures on the ballot next week in certain states will determine whether the rural / urban disparity in access to reproductive care will be relieved or exacerbated.
Propositions to expand access are on the ballot in Arizona, Florida, Missouri, Montana, and South Dakota.
Expanded abortion access is likely most significant in Missouri, which has the largest rural population among the states with expanded access measures on the ballot this year. Over 1.5 million of Missouri’s 6.2 million residents live in rural counties, with some having to travel 250 to get to the nearest abortion clinic under current circumstances.
Missouri’s Amendment 3 would remove the state’s ban on abortion and expand access until fetal viability with exceptions to preserve the health of the mother.
This analysis uses county-level travel distances to the nearest abortion clinic.
The rural category comes from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), which defines nonmetropolitan counties as all counties not in a Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA).
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