Self-Managed Abortion Increased In The 6 Months After Dobbs

Self-managed abortions using abortion pills increased in the six months following the Supreme Court decision that repealed federal abortion protections, new research shows.

The study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association on Monday, is a groundbreaking look at how self-managed abortion using abortion pills is becoming more and more common since the overturning of Roe v. Wade. It’s one of the few studies to analyze the prevalence of abortion outside of formal health care settings in the U.S.

Researchers found that 27,838 “provisions” of pills for abortions were sent to abortion-seeking people via community groups, international telemedicine organizations and online sources, in the six months after the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health decision that repealed Roe v. Wade.

Each of these “provisions” is defined as the “mailing or delivering of a pill pack for a self-managed abortion,” the lead author of the study, University of Texas at Austin associate professor Abigail Aiken, told HuffPost. The number of pill packs distributed represents a 322% average monthly increase from pre-Dobbs levels of medication abortion used for self-managing care, according to the analysis.

“We see over and over that when abortion bans are present, it doesn’t necessarily change the need for abortion,” Aiken told HuffPost. “People quite often will look for it outside the formal health care setting if access within the formal health care setting is taken away, and I think that’s what we’re seeing play out here now.”

Self-managed abortion refers to using drugs — either mifepristone and misoprostol or just misoprostol — to induce abortion without the oversight of an abortion clinic or physician. The study defined