Note: This explainer is an overview on the landscape of the Dobbs v. Jackson Supreme Court decision. As this legislation shifts on a daily basis, we will make every effort to keep this as current as possible with information and resources. For more regular updates as abortion legislation changes in states that are still vulnerable across the U.S., follow this interactive map at The New York Times. For how you can help your local abortion fund, stay updated at National Network of Abortion Funds.
On June 24, 2022, in a 5-4 decision, the United States Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the 49-year-old landmark case that established that the U.S. Constitution provides the right to privacy to anyone who wants to receive an abortion. The court’s decision on the Mississippi case Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization held that the Constitution does not guarantee the right to an abortion, which overturned both Roe and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the 1992 case that established the “essential holding” of Roe.
Per Guttmacher, as of July 29, 2024, 41 states have some level of ban on the procedure (14 total bans; 27 based on gestational duration; eight ban abortion before or at 18 weeks; 19 ban abortion in the period after 18 weeks).
In the wake of Roe’s demise, President Biden has taken steps to expand protections for people who are not able to receive care in their states through executive orders. Now, in an election year, the current administration is committing itself to protecting abortion if elected for a second term. On the second anniversary of the Dobbs decision, the then Biden/Harris campaign made clear that it was the current Supreme Court who “ripped away the fundamental freedom for women to access the health care they need and deserve.”
Since June 2022, abortion has been on the minds of voters across the U.S.— especially those whose states saw the overturn of Roe as the cue to further roll back abortion rights. In an April 2024 poll of 8,709 adults from Pew Research Center, a majority of Americans continue to voice their support for abortion rights.
The poll found that 85 percent of Democratic adults say that abortion should be legal in all cases, as do two-thirds of Republicans who identify as moderate or liberal; 41 percent of Republicans are less likely to say the same thing. Just over a majority, 54 percent of Americans, identify with the statement “the decision about whether to have an abortion should belong solely to the pregnant woman.”
As the Biden administration initially began its reelection campaign in 2024, abortion was at the forefront. Planned Parenthood has pledged $40 million to help boost those efforts, per the Associated Press. Through volunteer and paid canvassing programs, phone banking and digital, TV, and mail advertising, Planned Parenthood will target these eight states as battlegrounds: Arizona, Georgia, Montana, New Hampshire, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
“Abortion will be the message of this election, and it will be how we energize voters,” said Jenny Lawson, executive director of Planned Parenthood Votes. “It will be what enables us to win.”
On July 21, President Biden dropped out of the race and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, who has already made abortion a key focus ahead of the election. In March, she visited a Minnesota abortion clinic, which marked the first time a U.S. president or vice president had done so. In her first speech following Biden’s endorsement on July 22, Harris made a point to touch on reproductive rights: “The government should not be telling a woman what to do with her body.” She then promised to sign a law codifying abortion rights as the law of the land, should Congress pass one.
On August 6, Harris announced her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, who has been outspoken about his support of reproductive rights his entire career. In fact, Harris made a point to visit the Minnesota clinic to, she said at the time, "uplift the work that is happening in Minnesota as an example of what true leadership looks like, which is to understand it is only right and fair that people have access to the health care they need and that they have access to health care in an environment where they are treated with dignity and respect."
While the presidential election is top of mind for voters, it’s important to stay focused on state elections, especially now that Roe is no longer in place. Abortion could be on the ballot in at least these 11 states come November: Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New York, and South Dakota.
Here’s just one anecdote about why voting on this issue matters: On August 2, 2022, voters in Kansas voted overwhelmingly to preserve abortion rights in their state’s constitution. This, despite a misinformation campaign associated with the proposed "Value Them Both" amendment, which abortion advocates argued would have paved the way for a total ban on abortion in the state.
“The voters in Kansas have spoken loud and clear: We will not tolerate extreme bans on abortion,” Rachel Sweet, the campaign manager for Kansans for Constitutional Freedom, told the Times.
After the Supreme Court decision, the effects were immediate across more than a dozen states with “trigger bans,” or laws that immediately outlawed abortion upon Roe’s demise. Here are just a couple of stories from people in those states.
On June 26, 2022, two days after the Dobbs decision, a nurse named Ashley shared a text, via X, from her friend Lex, a fellow nurse, who shared her story of how pregnant people in states where abortion is banned were already in danger.
Lex shared that, after the trigger law went into effect in her state, a pregnant woman came in with an ectopic pregnancy, which means that the fertilized egg implants and grows outside the uterus, often in the fallopian tubes. A fetus does not survive this kind of pregnancy. Lex said that, before her team could take action, they had to call legal counsel and make sure providing care would not cost them their medical licenses. By the time they could treat the woman, her fallopian tube had ruptured, she had dangerous amounts of blood in her abdomen, and almost died.
In Missouri, the first state to ban abortion upon the Dobbs decision, there is a medical exception to the total abortion ban. The state defines this emergency as “serious risk of substantial and irreversible physical impairment of a major bodily function.”
Dr. Jeannie Kelly, a Washington University OB-GYN, told St. Louis on the Air that the definition is not clear enough and could cause real problems for providers who are trying to save their patients’ lives.
“Medicine, in general, is not really black and white in many circumstances,” she said, before continuing. “There are many clinical situations that we are concerned [about]. The law is vague, and the law is not well defined [regarding] these trickier situations where we're not sure: ‘Is this a medical emergency? Does it qualify as an exception to this abortion ban? Or would we be risking our licenses and we'd be risking jail time if we perform the abortion in this circumstance?’”
In June of 2022, a 10-year-old abuse survivor in Ohio had to travel to Indiana to receive an abortion because she was six weeks and three days pregnant. Following the Supreme Court’s decision on June 24, Ohio’s law banning abortion after six weeks took effect immediately.
The 10-year-old was referred by a child-abuse doctor in Ohio to Dr. Caitlin Bernard, who was able to provide her with care in Indiana. Bernard told the Cincinnati Enquirer that she knew her window to help was closing; she has since faced harassment, and the Indiana attorney general is asking that she face discipline for her actions.
“It’s hard to imagine that in just a few short weeks we will have no ability to provide that care,” she said, referring to the Indiana legislature’s plan to call a special session in late July to further restrict abortion beyond its current 22-week ban.
And these were just the first few weeks since Roe fell. In December of 2023, The 19th reported the health risks of pregnancy loss in a country with limited abortion access. They told the stories of people like Ann Carver (whose name was modified for privacy reasons), who experienced devastating pregnancy losses and who was afraid to get pregnant again for fear of not being able to receive the emergency care she might need in her home state of Georgia, which bans abortion after six weeks with limited exceptions.
As The 19th reported, one in three pregnancies results in miscarriages, but there are other forms of nonviable pregnancies, such as ectopic pregnancies, that can require intervention. There are other complications that occur in the second trimester, or stillbirth, which can occur after 20 weeks. And, as The 19th noted, “the standard medical treatment for any of these conditions often relies on access to abortion.”
In the two years since Roe was overturned, it’s become difficult to keep up with the number of cases in which pregnant people’s lives have been put at risk—or they were forced to carry pregnancies to term—because they couldn’t access necessary healthcare. In January, a study published in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine found that, after the fall of Roe, there were an estimated 520,000 rapes that led to 64,565 pregnancies in the 14 states with total abortion bans. The timeline on this data ranged from four to 18 months prior to the study’s publication.
Research published by the Society of Family Planning also found that between April 2022 to June 2023, there were fewer than 10 abortions in these total-ban states. This included states where there are exceptions to the bans for rape.
“Restricting abortion access to survivors of rape can have particularly devastating consequences,” JAMA’s editors wrote in a note about the new research. “Whether these survivors of rape had illegal abortions, received medication abortion through the mail, traveled to other states, or carried the child to birth is unknown.”
OBGYN Colleague in Missouri “We are now observing patients with ectopic pregnancy and hemoperitoneum until they have a documented falling hemoglobin or unstable vital signs”
— Jane van Dis MD (@janevandis) June 28, 2022
1:50 pregnancies is ectopic pic.twitter.com/HwYEMz67su
Per research published in the Times and gathered by the Guttmacher Institute, an estimated 170,000 people traveled to other states to receive abortions in 2023. This data also shows that out-of-state travel in 2023 was more than double compared to 2019. The Times notes that most people traveled to the nearest state where abortion is legal (like someone from Missouri traveling to Illinois or Kansas). In fact, per Guttmacher, 37,300 people traveled to Illinois from surrounding states and states in the South in 2023.
In the South, though, it isn’t as easy to find a bordering state with access. Every state in this region has restrictions or total-abortion bans, which means there are people who have to travel even farther. Sixteen-thousand patients from the South sought care in Illinois, and nearly 12,000 traveled to Northern states from South Carolina and North Carolina. Texas, the largest state with a complete ban on abortion (with very limited exceptions), saw 35,000 patients traveling to other states to receive care. Fourteen-thousand of them were able to travel to the New Mexico border; 21,000 went farther.
Because of these bans and restrictions, states have begun to prosecute their residents who receive life-saving care. Last September, Brittany Watts, a 34-year-old woman from Warren, Ohio, became the focus of international attention when, at 21 weeks and five days pregnant, her water broke prematurely. At the time, abortion was illegal in Ohio after 21 weeks, six days, but in the time in which Watts had to wait to be seen by a doctor, her pregnancy officially reached 22 weeks. A fetal heartbeat was present, but her doctor told her that her fetus would not survive and she’d need an abortion to induce labor and save her life.
She ended up miscarrying in her bathroom toilet, which became clogged with the fetus, and she was charged with the felony of abuse of a corpse as a result. This is a fifth-degree felony and means a year in prison and a $2,500 fine. In January, a grand jury decided not to indict Watts, but this case further highlighted the extreme danger that pregnant people—especially Black and brown pregnant people—are in if they live in non-access states.
Michele Goodwin, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, and author of Policing The Womb, told VOA news that Black women are “canaries in the coal mine" for the “hyper-vigilant type of policing.” She continues: “Post-Dobbs, what we see is kind of a wild, wild West,” she said. “You see this kind of muscle-flexing by district attorneys and prosecutors wanting to show that they are going to be vigilant, they’re going to take down women who violate the ethos coming out of the state’s Legislature.”
Soon after the Supreme Court’s decision, lawmakers used the momentum to pass restrictive legislation in their states. On August 5, 2022, Indiana became the first state to pass a ban on abortion that was not triggered by the overturn of Roe v. Wade.
The Indiana law, Senate Enroll Act (S.E.A. 1), initially took effect on September 15, 2022, with limited exceptions: serious risk to the health or life of a pregnant person; diagnosis of a “lethal fetal anomaly,”; and rape or incest before 12 weeks of pregnancy. But as providers have pointed out, language in laws like this can prove to be too vague and puts them in a vulnerable position during emergencies. It was blocked five days later, but in 2023, the Indiana Supreme Court allowed the ban to take effect. In April, the Indiana Court of Appeals affirmed a preliminary injunction that will allow Indiana residents to receive an abortion if it is their sincere religious belief that they must be able to obtain one.
To help people in Indiana who need abortions, you can support the Hoosier Abortion Fund, which is open to all residents of Indiana, “regardless of age, income, insurance, or immigration status.”
In addition to voting and advocating for pro-choice candidates in your state and at your local level, you can:
Regularly read websites that have state-by-state legislation information, including:
Hilary Weaver is a writer and editor based in New England. Her work has been published in The Cut, ELLE, Vanity Fair, Refinery29, Esquire, Cosmopolitan, The Nation, and more. She has covered reproductive rights both as a writer and as a fact-checker and researcher since 2015.