Stephanie Sy:
William, according to the latest data from the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization that advocates for abortion rights, there were just over a million clinician-provided abortions in states where it was legal in 2024. The numbers were up slightly from the previous year.
The data further shows that the number of people who crossed state lines for the procedure dropped nearly 9 percent.
For an update on the current state of abortion access, I’m joined by Mary Ziegler, professor at U.C. Davis. She’s written several books on abortion rights, including “Personhood,” which is out later this month.
Mary Ziegler, thank you so much for joining the “News Hour.”
So three years out from the Dobbs decision, several states have outright bans, and yet the number of abortions tallied by a Guttmacher has held steady, and other data shows abortions have increased more than 10 percent since 2020.
What is your reaction to this latest data?
Mary Ziegler, University of California, Davis, School of Law: It isn’t surprising, in a sense.
We have seen that passing a ban and enforcing a ban are two very different things, particularly when both pills and people are crossing state lines in the way we have seen since 2022. And I think the real question going forward is either whether states can project their power across state lines, for example, by prosecuting people in states where abortion rights are protected, or whether instead the Trump administration is going to impose some sort of national limit that changes the calculus.
Otherwise, I think we will likely continue to see data like these in the years to come.
