The Daily - The New U.S. Abortion Map

Episode Date: June 28, 2022

In the days since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, states have rushed to either ban, restrict or protect abortion.The different approaches have created a fragmented, patchwork map of America.Guest: Margot Sanger-Katz, a domestic correspondent covering health care for The New York Times.Want more from The Daily? For one big idea on the news each week from our team, subscribe to our newsletter. Background reading: With Roe overturned, the distances many women will need to travel for an abortion will increase drastically.Here are answers to some of the fundamental questions about the ramifications of the justices’ decision.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. 

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today. In the days since Roe v. Wade was overturned, state after state has raced to ban, restrict, or protect abortion. restrict or protect abortion. My colleague, Margot Sanger-Katz, on what access to the procedure now looks like across the U.S. It's Tuesday, June 28th.

Margot, the last time we spoke with you, it was right after a leaked version of a Supreme Court opinion overturning Roe v. Wade emerged. And we asked you to give us a map of what abortion laws would look like across the country, state by state, if, as we suspected, that draft version became a real Supreme Court ruling. And of course, that has now happened. It's no longer theoretical.

So we want to turn to you again to talk through the post-Roe map that has emerged since that ruling on Friday. So what are your first impressions of it? Well, I will say, you know, obviously I've been tracking this for a long time, and I've been looking at state laws and trying to figure out what the post-Rrial world would look like. But even having done that, I have to say I was surprised by the speed with which we saw states coming out and announcing that they would ban abortion. Effective immediately, abortion is now illegal in at least

seven states, including Oklahoma. South Dakota's trigger law. We've got Texas, we've got Louisiana and Arkansas. Idaho and Wyoming have those trigger laws. As of today, all abortions are now illegal in the state. Throughout the day Friday, it was just sort of state after state after state. Some clinics are already canceling patient appointments. You know, by the end of the day that the decision came out, we already saw quite a lot of states that were banning abortion, quite a lot of abortion clinics that were closing and no longer seeing patients. The doors of the only abortion clinic in New Orleans closed

immediately Friday morning. Abortion clinics here in Texas say they have stopped services. There's more to come, but the rapidity of it, I have to say, was a little bit jarring to me. The Supreme Court's decision to strike down Roe versus Wade now has roughly half of all states poised to ban or drastically restrict abortion. So orient us specifically in this new landscape, this post-Roe map. What are the ways that we should be thinking about the 50 states and how their approach to abortion has changed in the past four days or so? Well, I think the first group of states that are worth thinking about are these states that had trigger laws. I think we talked

about them before. These were sort of waiting to snap into place as soon as Roe was overturned, and quite a few of them happened automatically as soon as the law changed. And then there are a bunch more that have like a short waiting period and we can expect abortion to be banned in those states sometime by the end of the next month. So some of the states that have these trigger bans are North Dakota, Louisiana, Texas, Oklahoma. You know, there are states throughout the South and the West for the most part. And Margot, when we say banned, now that Roe is gone, what does that actually mean? If you want to get an abortion in these states, what kind of exceptions are being made? How ironclad are these bans? Overall, you really want to think of these as almost total bans. So all of them have exceptions

to save the life of the mother. And some of them have exceptions for situations in which the pregnancy is caused by rape or incest. But there's sort of what the law says. And then I think there's also the practical reality of what abortion is going to look like in these states. What do you mean? In these states, all of the abortion providers have stopped providing abortions. There are no abortion clinics that are currently operating. And so what that means is that if you are someone who is the victim of rape

and you might technically qualify for an abortion under this law, there may not be a place that you can go to get that abortion in that state. And, you know, I think that there are, of course, very dire health emergencies. You know, someone is in the emergency room with a life-threatening emergency, you know, related to an obstetrical problem, and maybe the physician might intervene. But in

general, most doctors in a hospital do not perform abortions as part of their normal medical practice. And so if you have a serious health condition, even if it is life-threatening, you still might also need to travel to another state. Interesting. So even the exceptions that are built into these bans are no longer really practical. So in a de facto way, these become total 100% bans based on the chilling effect that they have on clinics and doctors. Exactly. I mean, these laws provide felony penalties for doctors who perform abortions in violation of the law, and you could understand why these providers might be skittish

about wanting to perform abortions, even if they think, like, technically they are allowed. If they are wrong in their judgment, they could end up in prison for a long time. Hmm. We're largely talking, I suspect, about abortion as a surgical procedure, but what about medical abortions by pills? Are those encompassed or allowed within these banned states?

So technically, these laws that ban abortion ban all abortions, and that includes abortion pills, which are known to be safe and effective ways to end a pregnancy in the first 10 weeks of pregnancy or maybe a little bit longer. But as a practical matter, these pills are very likely to become the face of illegal abortion in the states that ban abortion because the thing about pills is you don't have to go to a medical office to get them. They can be transported through the mail. They're manufactured overseas in many cases. And there are a growing number of services that will provide women with these pills over the internet. So a woman will go to a website and either order these pills directly from an overseas pharmacy,

or there is this one organization called Aid Access that's run by a Dutch doctor. And there you can have a consultation with a physician and they will prescribe you the pills and then the pills will come to you directly in the mail overseas. So those are obviously in violation of the state laws banning medication abortions. But it's going to be, I think, pretty hard for the state to enforce those bans because they're not really going to be able to look at women's mail. Right. And we have a pretty good test case for how this may work out from Texas. That state has had a law that's been in effect since September that banned all but the very earliest of abortions. And after

that law went into effect, the number of abortions happening at Texas clinics declined by about half. But a lot of women were still finding ways to get abortions. Some women were traveling out of state to get abortions in other clinics, and that's something that we expect will happen in a lot of these states that are banning abortions. But then these pills from overseas also played a pretty big role. We worked with one of the largest providers of these pills, and they found that orders for overseas pills tripled after this law went into effect. About 1,100 women in Texas were ordering them every month, and that's almost as many as the number of women

who went out of state. Hmm. So in these states where abortion is now banned, we should expect to see something similar. Abortions carried out illegally, many of them with pills ordered from one of these overseas purveyors, and therefore they will be pretty hard to detect

and pretty hard to prosecute. I think that's going to become more and more common. Okay. So what's the next category of states that we should be thinking about? So I think the next category of states we're thinking about are states that have old laws. So Roe versus Wade was decided in 1973, and it said that there's a constitutional right to abortion everywhere in the country. At the time that

that decision came down, abortion was illegal in most states of the country. In the last 50 years, a lot of states have changed that, but not all. So there are a bunch of states that they don't have these new trigger laws. They're not recently trying to ban abortion, but they still have these old laws that have just been sitting on the books waiting for things to change. And I think an interesting example of this is actually the state of Wisconsin. Wisconsin's abortion law dates back to 1849. Wow. So that's before women could vote. It's a very old law banning abortion.

1949. So that's before women could vote. It's a very old law banning abortion. And you have a situation in Wisconsin right now where the governor of Wisconsin is a Democrat, is supportive of abortion rights and would like to try to preserve abortion rights in the state. But of course, there is a Republican legislature there. So this law is kind of going into effect. Wow. There is some uncertainty on the ground about whether it's valid, and I think that there will be legal challenges to this law. But in the short term, every single abortion clinic in Wisconsin closed on Friday because its providers were worried about getting into legal trouble if this law can, in fact, be enforced. dormant old law from the 1840s is many people in the abortion world fear snapping back into place in the absence of Roe. And as a result of that, there's no abortion in Wisconsin. That's right. And there are a couple other states like that as well. Alabama has an old law, and so does Michigan. Michigan's interesting because it has a sort of similar political

situation to Wisconsin, where there is a Republican legislature and a Democratic governor, and their law is actually tied up in court right now. So I think with a lot of these older laws, we're going to have to wait and see what the courts do before we know whether they're going to stay in effect. Got you. Okay. So what is the next batch of states we should talk about? So then I think there's a group of states that have not yet enacted these kind of total abortion bans, but have gotten really close. These are states that have passed six-week abortion bans. And in a lot of these cases, they passed them because they were hoping to be the test case that would overturn Roe v. Wade at the Supreme Court. And now that Roe v. Wade is overturned, legal and political analysts expect that they will go all the way. Interesting.

But it will take, you know, the legislature voting on new legislation. What's an example of one of these states that thought it might be the state to take down Roe with a six-week ban? So Ohio is an example of a state like that. Like, Ohio has a six-week ban, and there's a lot of reason to think that Ohio may come back and pass a state like that. Like, Ohio has a six-week ban, and there's a lot of reason to think that Ohio may come back and pass a total ban now. Got it. So overall, based on your reporting, how many states, now that Roe is gone, have or will very soon ban abortion entirely?

And how many people will be affected by that, do we think? So it depends a little bit on who you ask. Obviously, all these judgments involve some degree of political prediction about what the courts are going to do, about what state legislatures are going to do. But the estimates range from somewhere between 21 and 26 states are expected to ban abortion pretty soon. Living in those states, somewhere between 26 and 36 million women of reproductive age, if all of those states banned abortion, at the high end, that would be about half of all women of reproductive age who would be affected.

Wow. So we're talking about an extraordinarily large group of women. Yeah, I mean, this is a very big change in American life. It's going to affect a lot of the population. And as we've discussed before, because these states that are looking to ban abortion tend to be clustered together, it's kind of this big regional effect, too, where these women are going to live in places where abortion is banned, not just in their state, but in many of the states nearby as well. And that will affect their ability to exit their state

and be able to get an abortion in a state where it is legal. Just explain that. Maybe you can kind of put us on the map and illustrate that. So I think Louisiana is a good example. Louisiana has a trigger ban that went automatically into effect on Friday. It's currently the subject of litigation and has been put on pause. But I think it's important to understand that even though a lot of these trigger bans may end up in court, these states can still go ahead and pass new abortion bans. So ultimately, we will see Louisiana with some kind of abortion ban. And it's surrounded by other states that are also banning abortion. So Texas has a trigger law and a law from before Roe. Oklahoma has a trigger law and a new abortion restriction that's going into effect.

Arkansas to the north, Mississippi to its east is expected to ban abortion. And so is Alabama, Tennessee, Georgia, Kentucky, Missouri. When you sort of look all around, the states that are nearby are also looking to ban abortion. That means that a woman in Louisiana is going to have to travel hundreds and hundreds of miles in order to obtain a legal abortion at a clinic that is still offering them. So a place like Louisiana is a classic example

of not just a desert when it comes to an abortion, but a desert surrounded by more and more desert. Yeah, and as we see more and more states ban abortion in the coming weeks and months, the distances that women are going to have to travel to get an abortion are going to become more substantial and potentially insurmountable for some of them. We'll be right back. Marco, I recall from our last conversation, a group of states that you described as swing states. So politically purple states where it wasn't clear what the status of abortion access would be until Roe fell. So now that we have a ruling, are some of those states starting to pick a side and make their intentions clear?

I think they still are swing states in the sense that we don't know what is going to happen in them. But they also are states where there is an active political debate about abortion. We talked a lot about Florida the last time. Florida has passed a 15-week abortion ban. But so far, there have not been movements to go further. One state that I have been watching a lot and that I think is really interesting is Kansas. Kansas is another one of these states that's largely surrounded by other states that are going to ban abortion. And the

Kansas Supreme Court has said that there is a constitutional right to abortion in the state constitution. So Kansas legislature can't ban abortion right now but they are trying to pass a constitutional amendment to change the Kansas constitution and that amendment is on the ballot it will be voted on this August and there is a big political effort underway to get people to change the Kansas constitution I think it's widely expected if that ballot measure succeeds if the constitution of Kansas gets changed then Kansas could very easily become a state in the future that will ban abortion. Are there any other states in the swing state category that we should be watching? Yeah, North Carolina and Virginia are both states kind of on the northern edge of the south.

And I think both of them have shown some interest in regulating abortion, have some abortion regulations that are kind of on the books, but they're not these super severe, you know, six-week bans like we talked about before. These are milder restrictions. And the Virginia governor just came out in the last few days and said he would support a 15-week abortion ban. But realistically right now in both of these states, there's mixed political control of government. And I think that means it would be very difficult to pass new abortion bans in the short term. But there are elections coming up. And I think if the composition of the governments change, you could see the prospects for that kind of legislation changing pretty quickly, too. Got it. Finally, of course, there are the states that are not restricting abortion,

and some of them seem determined to protect abortion in every way possible. So tell us about the states in that category and what actions they have taken since Roe was overturned. So there are a bunch of coastal states that are very in favor of abortion rights, where their governments have really come out strongly to signal their support for abortion rights. Just on Monday in California, legislators set up a ballot initiative that would actually add abortion rights to the state constitution there.

That's going to come up for a vote in the fall. In Oregon, there's a law that provides financial assistance for women who want to come from other states to get abortions there. In Connecticut, there's a recent policy that will protect abortion providers from extradition if they run afoul of one of these abortion bans in another state. So we see these kind of coastal states making big moves. But I actually think the states that support abortion that are going to be most important in the future are states like Colorado and Illinois. These are states that, again, are surrounded by other states that want to ban abortion.

And a lot of what's been happening in those states is not so much new laws as it is a lot of kind of logistical planning around how are they going to accommodate this flood of new women that are going to travel into their existing set of providers. And what does that logistical planning look like? I think Illinois is worth looking at. So one of the things that they're doing there is they're setting up a giant call center where they're going to help direct women who are contacting them about where to go. They're going to try to triage as many as possible to medication abortions, which take a little bit less personnel and real estate. And then they're also bringing in more providers. A bunch of doctors and other clinical staff who

were doing abortions in Wisconsin are currently in Illinois training on how to use their medical systems so that they can provide abortions there. The difficulty, I think, for these states is going to be that there is going to be such a huge increase in the number of women who want to travel to them because there are so many states that are banning abortion that they may be overwhelmed even with all the things that they're doing to get ready. And that could become a problem even for women who live in those states. Explain that. So if you're a woman who lives in Illinois right now, you live in an environment in which you don't have to worry about your state banning abortion. There is a really strong commitment to reproductive rights. There are a number of abortion clinics that are available.

And right now they are meeting demand. But if there are hundreds and thousands of extra women who are trying to get abortions from all these neighboring states that are going to ban abortion, that means all those resources could get overrun and that it might take a lot longer for you as a local person to get an abortion. So this is how the end of Roe might actually end up impinging on the abortion rights and access of people, even in states that see themselves as staunch defenders of the right to an abortion, those states might just get overwhelmed. Yeah, when you look at the map, I think you have to think not just about what is the law in your state, but what is happening in your neighborhood? What is the law in the states nearby? Because we know that a lot of women will still want to get abortions, even if

they are illegal in their state, and they're going to go to the nearest state that has a clinic. So this is really interesting, and it feels like this could very well undermine a central argument made by the justices who voted to overturn Roe. What they said was that the decision would put abortion access in the hands of every state and its elected leaders, right? But if, in fact, by shutting down access to abortion in so many places so quickly, it's going to make access harder in states where elected officials don't want to restrict it, then that argument starts to fall apart. Yeah, I think there's a difference between what the law says on paper and what access looks like in real life. And the reality is, is that just having

a law that says that abortion is available does not make it so. And there just are a limited number of abortion providers and exam rooms and time in the day for these states as they start to get overwhelmed by women who are coming in from states that are banning abortion. coming in from states that are banning abortion. Over time, it may work out that, you know, everything will kind of adjust and there will be enough abortion providers for everyone who wants an abortion in the states that want to keep it legal. But in the short term, there's almost certainly going to be a lot of chaos and that's going to affect women in many states. But when the Supreme Court does something this large, reversing a constitutional right that's been in place for 50 years, the results really are going to ripple around the

country. It is not going to be neatly contained in the states that ban it and the states that allow it. Well, Margo, thank you very much. We appreciate it. Thanks for having me back. On Monday, in a decision similar to that in Louisiana, a judge in Utah blocked the state's trigger law from taking effect for 14 days. blocked the state's trigger law from taking effect for 14 days. But after that, the state's ban on abortions is expected to resume. Meanwhile, the Times reports that women and men fearful of losing access to abortion

have begun stockpiling emergency contraception pills such as Plan B, raising fears of shortages. That, in turn, prompted the country's largest pharmacy chain, CVS, to limit purchases on Monday to three packs per customer. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. In a surprise announcement, the House Committee investigating the January 6th assault on the Capitol

has abruptly scheduled a new hearing for this afternoon. The committee said that the hearing would focus on recently obtained evidence, but has so far declined to describe it. And on Monday, a Russian missile

struck a shopping center in eastern Ukraine, killing at least 13 people, wounding dozens more, and leaving them all engulfed in flames. Local residents quickly raced to the scene to try to rescue survivors. Come on, let's go, let's go.

It was the latest example of Russia's willingness to inflict indiscriminate violence against civilians more than four months into the war. Today's episode was produced by Sidney Harper and Eric Krupke. It was edited by M.J. Davis-Lynn, contains original music by Rowan Emisto, Marion Lozano, and Dan Powell, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landverg of Wonderly. That's it for The Daily.

I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.