The numbers - published on the third anniversary of the Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe vs Wade, and with it the US constitutional right to an abortion - reflect how that decision altered patients’ access to the procedure.
While the report found that patients came from Texas more frequently than any other state, it also showed that people from every state with a near-total ban sought abortions elsewhere.
The data does not establish why exactly patients went to the states they did.
Those judgments are based on different considerations, including whether another state mandates a waiting period before an abortion, requiring them to arrange a multiday trip, said Isaac Maddow-Zimet, a Guttmacher data scientist who led the study.
“People are weighing a lot of these factors - the cost, the interruption to their life that travel would cause - in trying to make a decision about how to get the abortion,” he said.
In April, Guttmacher found that fewer people travelled across state lines for an abortion in 2024 than 2023.
That change is in part because of telemedicine allowing for remote prescription of abortion pills, Maddow-Zimet said, especially for those who can’t afford to travel hundreds of kilometres.
“Telehealth provision has really filled that gap,” he said.
Guttmacher’s data is collected monthly from samples of abortion providers in states that do not have total bans.
It does not include “self-managed” abortions - instances when women ended their pregnancies without the direct involvement of a US clinician.
In the years since Roe was overturned, the country has seen a maelstrom of abortion laws - alongside legal challenges to them.
Some conservative states had “trigger laws” banning abortion that took effect soon after the decision.
Others passed more stringent restrictions after the high court’s decision. The new data zeroed in on one of them - Florida, where a six-week ban took effect in May 2024.
The ban affected both Florida residents and others in the South who had relied on the state as a key access point, forcing them to seek abortions elsewhere.
In 2024, Floridians travelled to Washington, DC, and nine other states for abortions, including Virginia, North Carolina, Michigan, and New York.
Virginia in particular played a key role in providing abortions for out-of-state patients in 2024, Maddow-Zimet said.
Though it is farther than North Carolina for patients in much of the South, it does not have the same 72-hour waiting period. There were 1620 Floridians who went to Virginia, according to Guttmacher’s data, up from 130 Floridians who visited the state in 2023 for an abortion.
The release of Guttmacher’s data coincides with a separate report published on Tuesday that found abortions were on the rise, reaching greater numbers than in 2022 and 2023.
By the end of 2024, a quarter of abortions were provided via telehealth - meaning clinicians remotely prescribed and dispensed abortion pills - according to the report from the Society of Family Planning, which has tracked abortions since April 2022.
Half of those telehealth abortions were facilitated by “shield laws” that allow providers to prescribe abortion pills to patients in states with bans.
Those measures are now facing their first significant legal tests. Still, access to telemedicine and shield laws for providers seem to be driving an upward trend in medication abortion.
It’s hard to tell what patterns the 2025 data will reveal about where and how people seek abortions, Maddow-Zimet said.
The numbers would be dependent on pending legal decisions, evolving state legislation and larger scale federal policy change that could occur.
“These data constantly just show me how unpredictable the landscape of abortion care is,” he said.
