New numbers released this week show that “telehealth” abortions are on the rise in the United States.
According to UC San Francisco, telehealth abortions mean that the medication abortion pills are delivered to a pregnant woman through the mail and she takes the drugs in her home. The abortion does not occur at a clinic and could lead to serious health complications.
#WeCount, a group of researchers who collect abortion data and operate under the Society of Family Planning, released the statistics on Wednesday.
“Since the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, the number of abortions in the United States increased, even as 14 states have banned abortion completely,” a press release from the organization said. The average monthly number of abortions continues to increase slightly, as compared to 2023 and 2022.
This increase is due in part to the expansion of so-called “telehealth” abortions.
“From January to March 2024, there were about 19,700 telehealth abortions per month, including those provided by brick-and-mortar clinics, virtual-only clinics, and under shield law protections to states with bans on abortion or telehealth. Telehealth abortions represent 20 percent of all abortions, nationally,” the organization noted.
“Telehealth abortion is making a critical difference for people seeking abortion care in this increasingly restrictive environment,” said Dr. Ushma Upadhyay, #WeCount Co-Chair and professor at the University of California, San Francisco’s Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health (ANSIRH).
“Telehealth also eases the surges and cuts down on wait times at abortion clinics providing in-person abortion care, which continues to be a critical route to abortion access, accounting for 80 percent of all abortions,” Upadhyay added.
According to the report, the states with the largest average number of abortions per month during January-March 2024 included California, New York, Illinois, Florida, and New Jersey. Through March 2024, six states enacted shield laws that provide legal protections to clinicians who offer abortion care via telehealth to people in states that have abortion or telehealth bans.
“Telehealth abortions provided under shield laws averaged 9,200 per month from January to March 2024. In the nine months from July 2023 to March 2024, over 65,000 people in states with total or six-week bans and states with telehealth restrictions have accessed medication abortion provided under shield laws,” the report stated.
“Abortion care provided via telemedicine by providers, operating under shield law protections, are a lifeline for women, transgender men, and gender non-binary individuals in states with abortion bans, whose next best option may be to travel hundreds of miles to reach an abortion clinic,” said Dr. Angel Foster, Co-Founder of The Massachusetts Abortion Access Project (The MAP).
“By providing safe, effective, FDA-approved medications to patients in all 50 states, we’re doing what we can to mitigate the Dobbs decision’s tremendous damage to abortion seekers’ reproductive health and autonomy,” Foster claimed.
In July 2022, in the aftermath of Dobbs, a Dutch physician told ABC News this week that she has seen a spike in requests for “telemedicine abortions” from American women, which Townhall covered. Since then, left-wing abortion activists have worked relentlessly to expand access to this dangerous abortion method.