Sarah Varney, KFF Health News
The share of people that say they’ve tried to finish a being pregnant with out medical help elevated after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. That’s in response to a study published Tuesday within the on-line journal JAMA Network Open.
Tia Freeman, a reproductive well being organizer, leads workshops for Tennesseans on how one can safely take remedy abortion tablets exterior of medical settings.
Abortion is nearly solely unlawful in Tennessee. Freeman, who lives close to Nashville, stated folks planning to cease pregnancies have all kinds of causes for wanting to take action with out assist from the formal well being care system — together with the price of touring to a different state, problem of discovering youngster care, and concern of misplaced wages.
“Some people, it’s that they don’t have the support networks in their families where they would need to have someone drive them to a clinic and then sit with them,” stated Freeman, who works for Self-Managed Abortion; Safe and Supported, a U.S.-based mission of Women Help Women, a global nonprofit that advocates for abortion entry.
“Maybe their family is superconservative and they would rather get the pills in their home and do it by themselves,” she stated.
The new research is from Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health, a analysis group based mostly on the University of California-San Francisco. The researchers surveyed greater than 7,000 folks ages 15 to 49 from December 2021 to January 2022 and one other 7,000-plus from June 2023 to July 2023.
Of the respondents who had tried self-managed abortions, they discovered the share who used the abortion tablet mifepristone was 11 in 2023 — up from 6.6 earlier than the Supreme Court ended federal abortion rights in 2022.
One of the most typical causes for searching for a self-administered abortion was privateness considerations, stated a research co-author, epidemiologist Lauren Ralph.
“So not wanting others to know that they were seeking or in need of an abortion or wanted to maintain autonomy in the decision,” Ralph stated. “They liked it was something under their control that they could do on their own.”
Kristi Hamrick, vice chairman of media and coverage at Students for Life Action, a nationwide anti-abortion group, stated she doesn’t imagine the research findings, which she stated profit individuals who present abortion tablets.
“It should surprise no one that the abortion lobby reports their business is doing well, without problems,” Hamrick stated in an emailed assertion.
Ralph stated along with privateness considerations, state legal guidelines criminalizing abortion additionally weighed closely on ladies’s minds.
“We found 6% of people said the reason they self-managed was because abortion was illegal where they lived,” Ralph stated.
In the JAMA research, ladies who self-managed abortion makes an attempt reported utilizing a spread of strategies, together with utilizing medication or alcohol, lifting heavy objects, and taking a sizzling bathtub. In addition, about 22% reported hitting themselves within the abdomen. Nearly 4% reported inserting an object of their physique.
The time period “self-managed abortion” might conjure photos of back-alley procedures from the Nineteen Fifties and ’60s. But OB-GYN Laura Laursen, a household planning doctor in Chicago, stated self-managed abortions utilizing remedy abortion — the medication mifepristone and misoprostol — are far safer, whether or not achieved inside or exterior the well being care system.
“They’re equally safe no matter which way you do it,” Laursen stated. “It involves passing a pregnancy and bleeding, which is what happens when you have a miscarriage. If your body doesn’t have a miscarriage on its own, these are actually the medications we give women to pass the miscarriage.”
Since Roe’s finish, greater than 20 states have banned or additional restricted abortion.
KFF Health News is a nationwide newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about well being points and is among the core working packages at KFF—an impartial supply of well being coverage analysis, polling, and journalism. Learn extra about KFF.
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