The consequences of the revocation of the Roe vs. Wade judgment are already visible in the United States, barely a month after it was enacted. According to a study published on Thursday, at least 43 clinics have stopped performing abortions. In the thirty days following this historic decision, eleven states have banned all abortions or after six weeks of pregnancy, counts the Guttmacher Institute.
According to the count of this organization which campaigns for access to contraception and abortion, 43 clinics, including 23 in the state of Texas alone, 5 in Oklahoma and 5 in Alabama, have shut down or refocused their activities on other care. One of them, “the “Maison Rose”, at the heart of the case that led to the Supreme Court’s about-face, closed on July 7th.
“Access to abortion will continue to deteriorate”
This clinic was for a long time the only one to perform abortions in Mississippi. “Access to abortion, which is already very poor in a large part of the country, will continue to deteriorate, as new states will adopt abortion bans in the weeks and months to come”, deplore the study authors.
Some states, like Louisiana or North Dakota, have laws banning abortions, but legal battles have slowed their implementation. Others, like Indiana, have convened an exceptional parliamentary session to adopt new texts to this effect. Eventually, half of the states, especially in the conservative south and center of the United States, should ban abortions.