On the third anniversary of the US Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, the Guttmacher Institute released new data on the state of residence of abortion patients who traveled out of state to obtain care in 2024.
The data are part of Guttmacher’s Monthly Abortion Provision Study, which provides ongoing national and state-level estimates of US abortion incidence and currently includes data from January 2023 through March 2025. The new findings add to the growing evidence on how abortion bans in individual states are affecting patient movement and reshaping access to abortion care across the country.
These findings underscore the important role that data play in tracking the evolving effects of abortion policies on access to care at the state, regional and national levels.
Interstate travel remains a critical pathway to abortion care
In 2024, 155,000 people traveled out of state for abortion care, representing 15% of all US abortion patients obtaining care in states without total bans. This total is a decline from 2023, when nearly 170,000 abortion patients traveled across state lines, and an increase from the pre-Dobbs baseline in 2020, when 81,000 abortion patients traveled out of state.
Similar to 2023, Illinois remained a critical access point in 2024, with 35,470 patients traveling from across the South and Midwest to obtain abortion care in the state. Likewise, more than 28,000 Texans continued to travel across the country for abortion care, going to states as far away as Maryland, Michigan, New York and Washington.
“While these findings show us where and how far patients are traveling, they are not able to capture the numerous financial, logistical, social and emotional obstacles people face. In addition to the travel costs, driving or flying across state lines often requires taking time off work, navigating complex logistics and arranging child care, not to mention paying for the abortion itself,” says Isaac Maddow-Zimet, Guttmacher Institute data scientist and study lead. “Everyone deserves the abortion care that best meets their needs, whether an in-person abortion at a clinic, medication abortion received via telehealth (including from providers operating in states with a telehealth shield law) or self-managing with medication abortion. But abortion bans make it difficult for many people to access their preferred method of care.”
The wide impact of Florida’s six-week abortion ban
These latest data on abortion patients’ state of residence emphasize the negative impact that Florida’s six-week ban, which went into effect on May 1 and was in effect for eight months of 2024, had on the abortion landscape in the Southeast and beyond. The number of Floridians traveling to Virginia—the closest state without an early gestational duration ban or a mandatory waiting period—dramatically increased from 130 in 2023 to 1,620 in 2024; Floridians traveling to North Carolina for an abortion went up sharply as well, from 210 in 2023 to 1,320 in 2024. Floridians also traveled as far as Michigan and New York in 2024, demonstrating the resiliency and motivation of abortion patients to get care.
“Florida had been an important access point for abortion in the Southeast, so when the state’s six-week ban went into effect in May 2024, it was not just Floridians who were impacted, but also the thousands of out-of-state patients who would have traveled there for care,” says Candace Gibson, Guttmacher Institute director of state policy. “The most extreme abortion bans are concentrated in the South, which makes it disproportionately difficult for people living in that region to exercise their fundamental right to bodily autonomy. But we know that abortion funds, clinics and providers throughout the South are working tirelessly—and with limited resources—so that as many people as possible can get the abortion care they need and deserve.”
The complete data set and graphic visualizations of the 2024 state of residence data are available on Guttmacher’s US Abortion Data Dashboard.
About the Study
The Monthly Abortion Provision Study estimates the number of clinician-provided abortions that take place each month in each US state without a total ban. It collects data on procedural and medication abortions provided at brick-and-mortar health facilities (such as clinics or doctor’s offices), as well as medication abortions provided via telehealth and virtual providers in the United States. Abortions are counted as having been provided in the state in which a patient had a procedure or where pills were dispensed.
Estimates are generated by a statistical model that combines data collected from monthly samples of providers with historical data on the caseload of every provider in the United States; as more data are collected each month, estimates for past months become more precise. In addition to median estimates for each month, we provide a range (uncertainty interval) that describes the precision of the estimates: A bigger range means that the estimate is more uncertain for a specific state and month, while a smaller range indicates that the estimate is more precise.
About the Guttmacher Institute
The Guttmacher Institute is a leading research and policy organization committed to advancing sexual and reproductive health and rights worldwide. The Institute has a long history of tracking abortion incidence in the United States and globally. Every three years since 1974, the Guttmacher Institute has conducted the Abortion Provider Census of all known facilities providing abortion in the United States to collect information about service provision, including total number of abortions.