On June 24, 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v.
Wade, ending 50 years of federal protection of abortion rights in the U.S. and opening the door for states to craft their own bans.
Since then, 14 states have banned abortion and 11 have established previously illegal limits on when a person can have one. About one in three women of childbearing age live in one of those states. "We are seeing profoundly unprecedented restrictions, far more extreme than anything that we saw in the decade of escalating restrictions that preceded Dobbs," said Amanda Stevenson, a sociologist and demographer who studies the impacts of abortion and family planning policy.
"We've seen restrictions that try to prevent all abortions, including abortions to save people's lives, and restrictions on abortion after six weeks, which is two weeks after a missed period—before most people know they're pregnant." The Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization ruling, or the Dobbs decision, has already fundamentally changed the way people access abortion in the U.
S. and even impacted the way people feel about sex and pregnancy. CU Boulder Today caught up with Stevenson on the eve of the two-year anniversary of Dobbs to get her take on the impacts thus far and what's to come.
We saw an estimated 171,000 people travel across state lines for abortion in 2023 alone—about one in five of all abortions that year. These are often people whose lives are already really hard. They're not ready to parent beca.