More Than A Magazine, A Movement
Pregnant and need not to be? You have options—no matter where you live. Here’s what you need to know about how to find abortion options.
For help, please look to these trusted groups:
Safe websites to buy abortion medication: Aid Access, Plan C Pills, Abortion Finder, I Need An A
If you need help affording abortion care, contact an abortion fund near you.
To protect your digital privacy when planning your abortion, click here.
For free legal help as a patient or doctor, call If/When/How’s Repro Helpline: 844-868-2812
For medical advice, contact the Miscarriage & Abortion Hotline: 833-246-2632
If you need to know the abortion law in your state, look to the Center for Reproductive Rights.
I have a confession: Despite tracking antiabortion fake clinics and their seedy dealings for more years, I sometimes get tricked by one. They’re just that devious and deceptive that even I can get duped.
Here’s a check list of what to look for if you’re just not sure that center near you actually provides or refers for abortion.
An increasing number of healthcare providers are prescribing abortion pills in advance of pregnancy, and many people are ordering these pills to have on hand in case they or a loved one needs them. Between September 2021 and April 2023, over 40,000 people ordered advance provision abortion pills. In one recent national survey, 65 percent of respondents said they would be interested in having these medications on hand. Advance provision abortion pills can significantly shorten the time between the decision to end a pregnancy and having an abortion. Growing legal restrictions on abortion and threats of even more restrictions once Trump is back in office have made this option more important than ever.
If someone needs an abortion and is unsure how to get one, they’ll probably do what seems obvious to many of us: Use Google or another search engine and type “abortion options near me.” It’s likely they’ll find a mishmash of antiabortion crisis pregnancy centers, clinics that aren’t actually near them, and irrelevant information.
That’s where the Online Abortion Resources Squad (OARS) comes in. We run the r/abortion subreddit on the social media platform Reddit. No matter who you are, where you live, or what you need regarding your abortion, you can write a post on the r/abortion subreddit any day at any time, and you’ll receive a quick, thorough, accurate and compassionate personal response.
The number of abortions in the first half of 2024 was significantly higher than the same period for the previous two years—according to the Society of Family Planning’s eighth #WeCount report, released last week, which measures the number of abortions in the U.S. each month from April 2022 through June 2024.
There has been a 20.4 percent increase in just three years, despite abortion bans in 14 states and severe restrictions in many others. (And these numbers only include clinician-provided abortions—there are many more self-managed abortions occurring outside of the formal healthcare system.)
There is much that a potential Harris administration and Congress could do to offset the impact of the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs ruling.
Congress could amend existing federal laws—starting with repealing the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits federal money from being used to fund abortions, or the Comstock Act, a Victorian law which some judges have interpreted as prohibiting the mailing of abortion pills. Congress could also enact legislation that protects the right to interstate abortion travel. Or Harris could ask Congress to pass a law that would guarantee the same kind of access to mifepristone that the FDA currently allows.
After reports emerged that two women died as a result of Georgia’s six-week abortion ban, abortion opponents are callously using these tragic deaths to fuel false claims that abortion pills are dangerous and to push for FDA removal of mifepristone from the market.
Rather than calling on legislators to clarify life-saving exceptions, abortion opponents are doubling down on misinformation they’ve been peddling for years about the safety of abortion pills.
A new report revealed the number of abortions in the first three months of 2024 was significantly higher than abortions in the first three months of 2023 and 2022.
Before telehealth abortion became available, patients had to travel hundreds of miles to brick-and-mortar clinics, walk a gauntlet of protesters and pay on average $560 for medication abortion. Now they can obtain abortion pills by telehealth from the privacy of their own homes and have them mailed directly to all 50 states with prompt delivery.
Shortly after taking office last year, Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell created a Reproductive Justice Unit that has worked tirelessly to protect and expand reproductive health, rights and justice. This Unit has focused on eliminating disparities in maternal health, combatting anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers, working across state lines to respond to national attacks on reproductive health care, and defending and enforcing Massachusetts’ strong legal protections for reproductive rights.
Since the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the number of out-of-state patients I’ve seen as an abortion provider in Maryland has skyrocketed. Many of the individuals who were able to get the abortion they sought had to navigate costly barriers. However, the patients I see are the ones who have overcome all of these obstacles to get the basic healthcare they need.
It pains me to think about all the patients who do not make it to the health center, the ones who cannot navigate the myriad barriers to get the abortion care they need out-of-state.
The overall number of abortions obtained through the formal healthcare system in 2023 exceeded that number in 2022, with telehealth abortion rising to 19 percent of the total, according to the Society for Family Planning’s sixth #WeCount report, released last month.
Before COVID-19, patients had to travel hundreds of miles to brick-and-mortar clinics, walk a gauntlet of protesters and pay on average $560 for medication abortion. Now they can obtain these pills by telehealth from the privacy of their own homes and have them mailed directly to them in all 50 states with prompt delivery, for a sliding scale fee of up to $150.